Democracy Ateneo Announcement 10-19-13

Compañer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, October 19, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose <http://www.casavicky.com/>) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.
On Saturday, October 5, 2013, Our Hallowed Ground --The Love Balm Project <http://lovebalmformyspiritchild.tumblr.com/> convened a site-specific performance that celebrated the life of Daniel Booker, a father, husband, and young man lost to community violence at the corner of 2nd St. and Santa Clara streets in San Jose. We learned of Daniel's life and struggles through the testimonio of his mother Yasmin Flores who's own struggle with her loss was performed by Anna Maria Luera (with the assistance of Rebecca Novick) at the site that Daniel's life was taken. Following the performance we assembled at the San Jose Peace and Justice Center to share food, have a drink, and reflect on the impact of violence, especially police violence, in our communities. Together we observed how so many in our community are "targeted" by law enforcement; we interrogated new strategies of militarized policing such as Urban Shield <https://www.urbanshield.org/>; and we recognized the efforts in our community to document the violence directed at us. The conversation facilitated by Arielle Brown, the creator of the Love Balm Project, invited us to think of new strategies to return to our communities overcoming the divisions often manufactured between us to listen to, archive, and circulate our own testimonios. This offers a tremendous opportunity to come together across different spaces and projects to connect, facilitate critical exchanges, and situate research in relation to these struggles. The Love Balm Project provokes new thinking about how to integrate families, communities, and organizers from across the Bay to participate in collaborative research projects that generate the testimonios of mothers (and fathers) who survive the impact of state and community violence in their lives.

The space of reflection and action following the site-specific performance allowed us to recall the critical importance of how we document the violence directed at our communities and how we learn about the multiple strategies of resistance we deploy to mitigate state violence. The questions and analysis that the Love Balm space (both at the site of the shooting and at the Collins House) made possible generated a number of provocations and these taking place in a specific conjuncture of community resistance. The first provocation invites us to recall the recent hunger strikes (2011-2013) and their contribution to catalyzing a reconfiguration of the relations between scholars, activists, lawyers, policy makers, architects, families and prisoners. (For an interactive timeline see <http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/archive/>). A second provocation has been for our self-organization against state violence, both that directly executed by law enforcement and the violence manufactured by the state, to reclaim our community and minimize the emphasis responding to and organizing from one shooting or death in custody to the next. (See for example the growing opposition to Alameda County's Urban Shield at <http://facingteargas.org/facing-urban-shield-action-network>) A third provocation revolves around the critical challenges of making sure our efforts towards community regeneration engage self-active efforts towards community safety taking place both inside and outside the prison industrial complex.
We recognize, for example, that there is a desire to learn together from the inside and from the outside. Women with whom we work who organize inside the Central California Women's Facility through the Juvenile Offenders Committee (JOC), for example, now represent the impact of increasingly draconian youth sentencing in California’s "tough on crime" legislation. Many have been incarcerated since they were juveniles and face life without parole sentences (LWOP). For these women, how they live inside and how they struggle together in terms of engaging and theorizing their situation, as well as understanding themselves against group work that continuously reinscribes them as criminals, is a critical aspect of their dignity and survival. They are eager to confront the legislation and struggles outside from their position inside. Many are already writing, but often via the individualized, personal narrative as a plea for recognition. They have asked for new ways to learn and to learn together across this inside/outside boundary, as a way of negotiating this divide.

Similarly, it is repeatedly confirmed to us by women that we visit there as part of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) that there is a lack of serious, facilitated spaces for shared learning and theorization. Some prisons, for example San Quentin in the Bay Area, are proximate to urban areas and experience a steady influx of non-profit programming and a range of classes. However most prisons remain largely isolated and offer few educational opportunities outside of correspondence courses that rarely go beyond a two year Associate’s degree. Of the programs offered inside prisons like Chowchilla, the majority emphasize self-help and circulate narratives of addiction, anger management, and personal responsibility. There is no analysis of capital relations, or formations and experiences of gender and race in confrontation with the state. From the outside, the desire to learn runs the risk of relying only on the Academy's "carceral studies" model or scholarship that theorizes the prison (its disciplinary regimes, its dehumanization, its architecture, etc.) without engaging the life and struggles inside. Similar to scholarship directed at the problems of “low income communities” and needs of the underprivileged, prison scholarship as a disciplinary niche often does little to interrupt the proliferation and violence of punitive institutions (and frequently borders on a fascistic love of the machine). We see the importance in cultivating spaces of encounter inside with networked spaces outside, including affirming the connections between families across walls that disrupt the seduction of a newly emerging "area studies" with the prison at its center.

The violence directed at the community by the policing and prison apparatus as a whole impacts women, directly and indirectly. Women’s rates of incarceration have more than tripled since the 1980s, particularly targeting women of color. This violence and absence reverberates throughout families and communities. Our examination of the social factory and capital’s efforts to displace the cost of reproducing the worker onto women, the household, and the community recognizes “the community” as a principal site of struggle and women as key agents undermining capital’s efforts to impose capitalist social relations. (See, James and Dalla Costa, Power of Women and the Subversion of Community <http://www.box.com/shared/hbhp7mpv94>) However, this analysis is incomplete without sustained engagement with the prison system, the women inside and the impact of their gendered experiences of having been criminalized in and through the social factory.

In addition, there is a need to establish an archive based on open strategic systems of information that work both inside and outside and to simultaneously establish more deliberate spaces of co-learning across and beyond walls. Recently, Loic Wacquant has noted the absence of prison ethnography. (See, L. Wacquant, "The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration," <https://app.box.com/s/9e81refruhbg81qb04rr>). This is particularly true for writing about women’s experiences in prison. Several projects like the SF BayView newspaper, an inside/outside publication, continue to provide a space for prisoners to document their experiences and stay in contact with struggles on the outside as well as to “communicate” between struggles inside (which they cannot do, for example, with letters between prisons). Notably, CCWP’s longstanding publication The Fire Inside exists as a mechanism for making visible the experiences of women inside and to communicate between struggles inside and outside. On the outside Feminist collectives such as Precarias a la Derivas have emphasized the ethnographic approach of the drift as a political form of moving inquiry into everyday patterns of life, work, and care. (See, Precarias, "adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work" <https://app.box.com/s/f8k96zooxarv3mevumqz>). The archive must be generated collaboratively, prioritizing the ethnographic approaches explored and advanced from those inside as well as from the outside as in the case of the documenting and commemoration made possible by projects such as Our Hallowed Ground -- The Love Balm Project. The Love Balm Project is valuable in thinking through systems of information as collaborative moments and collective documentation. Artist Arielle Brown collaborated with mothers and grandmothers across the Bay Area who have lost children to police and street violence to collect their testimonios of life and loss. These testimonios generated monologues that were then performed on the sidewalk or street where the loss happened, making visible the militarization occurring in our communities, the violence disproportionately experienced by people of color, and the complexity of social networks that violence interrupts.

Our efforts to collaborate and transgress inside and outside boundaries includes current research strategies for People's Investigations that focus on critical moments of police violence and corruption. Our work documents specific incidents while also interrogating on-going patterns of militarized policing in Oakland, including the Riders' case, Three Strikes legislation, and "gang" crackdowns, alongside a glut of unresolved homicides. In these investigations, we have been exploring the knowledge generated at insurgent learning spaces and through convivial research tools such as timelines and taxonomies that make observable police excess, including a Rogue's Gallery (like a family photo album) that graphs police departments and catalogs the history and careers of individual police officers together with their photos. These collective investigative tools also contribute to our on-going work in developing a People's Database that maps particularly violent law enforcement personnel across jurisdictions as they move from one department to the next with no official or community oversight. People's Investigations and the People's Database also co-construct systems of information that archive community-based knowledges that narrate individual police officers actions over time and across districts. Tools and approaches such as the People's Investigation and Database can help us think through specific local racialized contexts that funnel people into the prison system at various points or put their lives at risk in their own communities. At the same time, we must continue conversations that affirm family's engagement and connection across and beyond boundaries, while recognizing that these engagements may also be polymorphous between prisoners and families.

We imagine a series of engagements that might coincide with exchanges and visits inside making strategic use of ateneos, including proposed ateneos such as the Social Factory Ateneo in Oakland. These networked spaces will allow us to collectively navigate the institutions of the commons across and beyond prison walls as well as other boundaries. The Social Factory Ateneo, for example, can serve as a regular site of connection and theorization in this inside/outside space. The ateneo’s crafting of announcements, formation of questions, and collaborative summaries are all written forms collectively generated knowledges that can be exchanged across walls. The ateneo could be structured to include collaboration with women inside and would encourage co-learning and co-research to understand capitalist social relations, precarity, and gendered sites of struggle. Additionally, given that inmates are required to accumulate certificates of completion that demonstrate successful and regular programming committed to repentance and reform, recognition of this collaborative participation could be acknowledged through Uni-Tierra Califas, with formal certificates in critical ethnography and convivial research.

The Social Factory Ateneo, much like the Love Balm Project, are some of the many spaces that promote institutions of the commons. These projects are just a few of the topics we will take up at our next ateneo. Please join us.

South Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo announcements and summaries <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/democracy_ateneo> and more information on the ateneo more generally, please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>.

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