Democracy Ateneo Summary 12-15-12

Compañer@s,

What follows is a brief summary of the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo convened on Saturday, December 15, 2012. Eight of us gathered for the regularly scheduled ateneo. After a brief welcome we agreed to share a quick update of our current projects and to share questions.

The December ateneo began with an invitation of participants to share an update about current projects. The update introduced a number of critical projects taking place throughout Califas. These included a number of "militant research" projects in Oakland and Berkeley. Similar collective research projects focused on community safety in San Jose that have been developing a "newsletter" that documents police excess, especially abuses in the schools. As part of that effort folks have been promoting know your rights trainings. Additional projects further south included the 9th Annual Enero Zapatista, a "month long series of politically and culturally conscious events in San Diego that commemorate the uprising of the Zapatistas of 1994" <enerozapatista.wordpress.com>. Many of the projects invited a critical focus on the politics of knowledge production especially how we engage many of its dimensions, including engaging spaces of encounter as sites to generate critical inventories and insurgent archives as part of a networked effort of knoweldge production.

The discussion that followed the brief updates focused primarily around the challenges and opportunities of knowledge production in relation to reclaiming community especially as we think through collective strategies to produce and archive insurgent knowledges, and this in opposition to the violence of the state. A portion of our discussion engaged the question of "decolonization" specifically asking when it becomes more than a metaphor. (See, Wayne Yang, "decolonization is not a metaphor" <http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630>). Are we trying to bring local knowledge to the university in order to legitimize it or are we trying to make elite knowledges more accessible?

In this context, community of struggle functions as a political category, making sure we are explicit in how we make use of it. Community of struggle as a category can mobilize specific aspects of our community, draw from locally rooted wisdoms, and expose the challenges it faces. What mediates communities of struggle, both externally and internally, as we consider claiming communities in specific contexts? Can a community of struggle, once claimed, become a space of healing?

A critical dimension of claiming community revolves around the very practice of knowledge production. Local knowledges about a community's struggles, for example, can be archived and available in a variety of formats including, for example, a community garden that archives the struggles and wisdoms of a community emerging over generations. The living elements of a garden can be a rich tapestry of specific histories that can be easily decoded by locally rooted members.

Community and the strategies of knoweldge production that help give it shape also intervene in the spontaneous and manufactured moments of "crisis" managed by the state as part of an on-going war, either in the immediate mobilizations of state and market interests or in the on-going conflict organized through primitive accumulation. State terror, for example, not only puts communities at risk but also can de-politicize particular mobilizations. Gathering the day after the tragic mass murder in Connecticut reminds us of how war manages the production of ideological surplus value. In the case of Connecticut, the shock from the tragedy highlights how privilege always believes that it can escape the very violence it produces. It also underscores the invisibility of the daily violence experienced by communities "more vulnerable to social death" than more privileged communities. (See, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism <https://www.box.com/s/8ipppx0pr7yt66w8bfxr>).

Communities of struggle are always resisting and that resistance is always available as an archive. Drawing from the Zapatistas as a critical point of reference, we are reminded that dignity as a political category helps mobilize resistances, creates spaces for its exercise, and generates a praxis for its continuation. As part of that project, dignity necessarily produces knowledge about its emergence. The politics of dignity does not require a translation insisting on capture from one idiom to another, but rather invites an engagement of one community of struggle with another. An example of an exercise of dignity would be the Zapatistas who have managed their dignity not only in the assertion of it, but also through the rich "living archive" they make available to document, narrate, explain, and theorize their struggle. But, other examples of the knowledge generated through the exercise of dignity might be the San Francisco Mission District's on-going Queer Qumbia and its success in creating a space of encounter in service of a community of struggle and generate resources in its service.

Spaces of knowledge production are always, to greater or lesser degrees, spaces of enchantment. In this instance, the excitement and connection to community does not always have to be verbalized as much as felt. The state and capital attempts to produce orphans, robots, or monsters why communities of struggle, as spaces of enchantment, encourage the negotiation between the active claiming of either of the role of good, bad, or a non-subject.

We concluded our reflection and action space ...

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Questions
1. How do we do collective ethnography?
2. How do we make visible/reclaim social dimensions of knowledge production?
3. How do we teach the importance of knowledge production as a collective process?
4. What assumptions of knowledge production are "common sense"?
5. Is "whiteness" a historical, anti-democratic, anti-collective way of being?
6. How do we go beyond gun control?
7. What's at stake when we do not see knowledge production as social?
8. What does decolonizing mean to people of color in the U.S.?
9. What does it mean to "decolonize" knowledge production in colonized spaces?
10. What does decolonizing look like in settler colonial spaces?
11. What does the archiving of knowledge production look like when its strategic?
12. What privileges accrue to archiving specific knowledges and strategies of production?
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For access to previous Democracy Ateneo announcements and summaries go to <http://cril.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>. The Democracy Ateneo is convened every third Saturday of the month at Casa de Vicky (792 East Julian Street, San Jose), from 2-5pm.