Angels in Ciudad Juárez try to reduce violence

“At crime scenes and busy corners recently, more than a dozen angels have appeared — 10 feet tall, with white robes and wide feathered wings. The fact that these angels are mostly teenagers from a tiny evangelical church on a dirt road makes their presence no less striking: they carry signs to murder scenes that say “murderers repent.”

“It’s incredible, one of the most spectacular things I’ve seen,” said Jesús Nuñez, director of Tocando Puertas, a local social service agency. “It’s dangerous, but they keep doing it.’”

Photos of Colombian students fighting riot police

“Now this is how you protest. Thousands of students from more than 30 public universities took to the streets in Colombia to protest against proposed education reforms they fear will partially privatize higher education.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/photos-of-colombian-students-protesting-against-ri

OCCUPY WITH LEGOS

(click on the picture to read the whole article)

“I’ve been wanting to do some sort of installations inside of the abandoned newspaper receptacles spread throughout our city, so I spent most of Thanksgiving creating a diorama of the UC Davis pepper spray incident which was installed in an empty newspaper bin on Market Street this morning (Black Friday). My hope was to install a piece to get people thinking about recent police violence while they were trying to do their holiday shopping. If I had more time I would have created many more dioramas based on scenes from New York and Oakland.”

juana — this is great! thanks for putting it together. i attended the event on friday with several students from my american / women’s studies class at uc davis. during the talk, i received word that chancellor katehi had requested that occupy/decolonize uc davis take down their tents, and just after the talk i received word that several students had been arrested and that many others had been pepper sprayed. many of the students in our class were present on the quad and are actively involved with the movement’s organizing. 

tomorrow we are holding a teach-in, entitled “keywords for imagining others: campus safety,” where we’ll be building on many of the ideas dean shared with us all on friday, on our readings of dean’s piece  ”methodologies of trans resistance,” and on the work we’ve done this quarter on biopolitics and population control, criminalization and the prison-industrial-complex, and now, during our final section, on the neoliberalization of higher education. throughout we want to be sure to maintain a focus on the ways in which systems of racialization, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nationality/citizenship status undergird the intertwined systems of capitalism and neoliberalism. 

we are especially interested in thinking about ways to make “cops of campus” a reality and devising a set of alternative strategies and institutions for creating a more genuinely safe campus community. if anyone has thoughts or ideas on this topic (perhaps inspired by last friday’s events?) that they’d like to share i’d love to hear from you and share with the group tomorrow. if you want to post here, that would be great, but you can also email me at ahboggs@ucdavis.edu

It has been another hard week.  The pepper spray directed at UC students has reached out through the screen to sear our collective vision.  For some that outrage feels new.  Yet we know that there is so much violence that we don’t see, that we refuse to see, violence that is not directed towards the hopeful young faces of students.  How can we use this moment to begin to recognize and respond to other more quotidian acts of violence that involve young men of color shoved and frisked against the walls of city streets; immigrants stopped, threatened, detained and separated from those that they love; people questioned and harassed for using bathrooms that don’t correspond to the pictures on the door; homeless people rattled from their sleep on a sidewalk who are told to vacate the space of the public; the routine injustices that occur at every moment in the detention facilities of the state?  

Listening to Dean Spade’s talk on Friday at Berkeley, one of the echoes that keeps spinning in my mind is about how to respond to violence in ways that don’t create more systems of victimization, incarceration and violence. How can we use this moment to respond of the machinery of the state? Right now faculty at UC Davis and at UC Berkeley are calling for the resignation of key administrators who authorized these acts of violence on our campuses. But what is also happening that I find so much more exhilarating is that people are also calling for these University Police Departments to be disbanded.  People are questioning the very premise by which we think of health and harm on campus.  This crisis is not just about these individuals, it is about a system that controls through criminalization, that is intent on keeping “outside elements” outside of universities.  That—and so much more—is what we need to work against. 

 Critique alone—necessary, urgent and ongoing—is never enough, we have to imagine otherwise.

 How can we respond to violence in ways that recognize the humanity of those that perpetuate it while seeking to also make accountable the social forces and institutions that continually authorize and reward acts of exclusion, harassment and violence?

 How can we use this moment to make questions of race, immigration, sexuality, disability, homelessness and poverty central to discussions about social inequality rather than seeing these issues as tangential to issues of access to education, housing, health care and public discourse?

 This blog is an invitation to risk proposing ideas, strategies, and momentary solutions, an invitation to envision another world and another way of being in the worlds that surround us and in the worlds yet to come.

“Wait—what’s wrong with rights?

Much of the legal advocacy for trans and gender nonconforming people in the US has reflected the civil rights and “equality” strategies of mainstream gay and lesbian organizations—agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee equal access, nondiscrimination, and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same “neutral” legal structures.”

Normal Life By Dean Spade