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| Emory | 2 | La Salle TP | Luke Bagdon |
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| Glenbrooks | 4 | Harvard-Westlake AL | Jacob Lugo |
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| Glenbrooks | 7 | Harker DV | Andrew Wixson |
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| Grapevine | 1 | Strake ZD | Demarcus Powell |
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| Grapevine | 4 | Newman Smith VY | Harry Yu |
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| Greenhill | 4 | Sage Hill MP | Varad Agarwala |
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| Harvard | 7 | Dulles TY | Eric He |
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| Kandi King | 1 | Immaculate Heart BC | Panel |
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| Scarsdale | 2 | Princeton ML | Sai |
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| Scarsdale | Octas | Prospect ST | Panel |
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| TOC | 6 | Memorial DX | Quinn Hughes |
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| Emory | 2 | Opponent: La Salle TP | Judge: Luke Bagdon 1AC - lobbying |
| Emory | 4 | Opponent: Orange Lutheran AZ | Judge: Dylan Sutton 1AC - ethnofuturism |
| Glenbrooks | 4 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AL | Judge: Jacob Lugo 1AC - prisons |
| Glenbrooks | 5 | Opponent: Millburn MM | Judge: Derek Hilligoss 1AC - prisons |
| Glenbrooks | Doubles | Opponent: Harker AR | Judge: Panel 1AC - prisons |
| Glenbrooks | 7 | Opponent: Harker DV | Judge: Andrew Wixson 1ac - prisons |
| Grapevine | 1 | Opponent: Strake ZD | Judge: Demarcus Powell 1AC - fem |
| Grapevine | 4 | Opponent: Newman Smith VY | Judge: Harry Yu 1AC - women's health |
| Greenhill | 4 | Opponent: Sage Hill MP | Judge: Varad Agarwala 1ac - fem |
| Harvard | 7 | Opponent: Dulles TY | Judge: Eric He 1AC - carbon copy |
| Kandi King | 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart BC | Judge: Panel 1AC - dispo ac |
| Scarsdale | Octas | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Panel 1AC - prisons |
| X | Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na ) |
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1- Contact InfoTournament: X | Round: Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na I disclose and format my documents the way I learned on my team. If you need me to change my docs (i.e change the highlighting color, change the font for accessibility reasons) I am very happy to accommodate. If you want me to meet any interps before round, please let me know. | 9/8/21 |
JF- Carbon Copy 1ACTournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Dulles TY | Judge: Eric He | 2/20/22 |
JF- Ethnofuturism 1ACTournament: Emory | Round: 4 | Opponent: Orange Lutheran AZ | Judge: Dylan Sutton ‘Ethno-‘ is the link to the national and the indigenous; ‘futurism’ is the attempt to find a place and be competitive in the post-modern contemporary world. – Viktor Shibanov ROJ and Cunningham CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER EDUCATION – critical pedagogy is desperately needed.. “The backlash” begins an opinion piece in Newsweek by Parents Defending Education outreach director Erika Sanzi, and these may be the most accurate two words published by those who are attacking “wokeness,” gender studies, and Critical Race Theory. The sad fact is that white backlash has a proven record of effectiveness in American politics and it is once again being employed in the service of right wing corporate interests. The end product desired has less to do with CRT than with spreading disruption, fear, and chaos across America’s most important democratic public institution, schools. According to the Washington Post, as of June 24 CRT (a theory developed in law schools and not well known among most Americans) has exploded on Fox News. The term was heard on Fox only 132 times in 2020 but has been mentioned 1,860 times this year, escalating month by month. The narrative is that grassroots parents groups have discovered the threat CRT poses to their children in schools and have arisen organically across the country to form local parent groups, a movement noticed and captured by websites and the powerful Fox News. The truth is that of an oligarch-funded and coordinated campaign using time tested techniques. He adds: Coincidentally or not in 2017 the civil rights-proclaiming Ms. Rodrigues and the radical right Ms. Sanzi were partners in another venture named Planet Mom, which featured a podcast and proposed radio show. In her paid position at Education Post Ms. Sanzi wrote of Ms. Rodrigues “I consider her a partner in this work. And a friend.” It’s a small planet, after all. The point is not Critical Race Theory, or charter schools, virtual schools, or home schools. The point is to undermine public education, keep taxes low, spread doubt of the efficacy of public goods, and demolish institutions like unions and local school communities that make demands on the Waltons and Kochs of the nation. It is, as Nancy MacLean has said, to put democracy in chains. Diverse-presenting National Parents Union and white backlash Parents Defending Education serve the same cause. Whither We Are Tending and What to Do About It I hope my colleagues in academia continue to speak out about the intellectual contributions of Critical Race Theory and the fine efforts of K-12 educators to provide the kind of schooling all our students need—open and honest about the nation’s race and history and our ongoing challenges, including corporate promoted white backlash. On the other hand, don’t expect any engagement from Nicole Neily or the anti-CRT bard Christopher Rufo, who has helped spike this ridiculous campaign. In a triumphant appearance at the Claremont Institute, Rufo described his annoyance at scholars trying to bait him into a discussion of what CRT really means and proclaimed “I don’t give a shit about this stuff.” (Nine minute mark) As Isaac Kamola has urged, start with follow the money and pursue that relentlessly. There’s a reason groups like PDE and NPU can’t come clean about their funding sources and amounts and that reason is that they know the public is suspicious of the Kochs and Waltons of the world and what’s more, the public and America’s billionaires are on a different page on policy issues. These are corporate generated right wing attacks. Say it. Name names. Come awake to the threat. Recognize what this is and that isn’t just about wokeness or even education but something else Koch and the Waltons can’t say out loud: to destroy the capacity of people to coalesce together and fight for a better life for themselves, a project that offends oligarchs ideologically and threatens their power and pocketbooks. They focus on education because schools have been a fertile locale for white backlash but also a source of great progress, because teachers unions are a barrier to them, and because local community organizations defy them. That means that teachers unions, school boards, superintendents, principals, lunch workers, school bus drivers, custodians, business, parents and students—everyone who serves their local school community—have to recognize that they need to fight together against this assault. In other words, join together to take action—exactly what the Waltons, Kochs, and other radical right billionaires fear. And stand up for a real education for all our children, not the white(wash) backlash being promoted by phony AstroTurf fronts like Parents Defending Education. Remember, fronts are fronting for someone and in this case, fronting for radical right billionaires. Money never sleeps. Thus, I would propose interpreting “one-dimensional” as conforming to existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society. In Marcuse's usage the adjective “one-dimensional” describes practices that conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs. This epistemological distinction presupposes antagonism between subject and object so that the subject is free to perceive possibilities in the world that do not yet exist but which can be realized. In the one-dimensional society, the subject is assimilated into the object and follows the dictates of external, objective norms and structures, thus losing the ability to discover more liberating possibilities and to engage in transformative practice to realize them. Marcuse's theory presupposes the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world, perceived as substance, which contains possibilities to be realized and secondary qualities like values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations, which can be cultivated to enhance human life. He adds: In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserl and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse's critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing techno- logical imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior. Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse's most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one's perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way. Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals' full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one's own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self- transformation. Thus, the Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Rejection of One-Dimensional Thought. This means distancing ourselves from essentializing modes of thinking – e.g., the notion that value can only come from money. We measure the standard based on whether we remain open to multiple ways of knowing or approaching problems; the more restrictive the approach, the less we adhere to the framework. Jones 1 In the squo, space is only seen as valuable if it is something to profit from. Along with increasing interest from private actors, discussions surrounding the enclosure of Outer Space – and asteroid mining more specifically – has seen growing coverage in recent years, several countries having passed legislation to begin legalising and encouraging extraterrestrial extractivism 5. Manoeuvres to enclose the extraterrestrial common and begin mining operations necessitate the establishment of a rights regime to ensure any disputes over access and ownership can be resolved. This opens a regulatory ‘frontier’ through which issues of land tenure and ownership can be thrashed out, taking on significance through its ability to greatly influence influxes of capital into these operations and mineralogical deposits (Bridge, 2004). Through the regulatory enclosure of Outer Space, a regime of exclusion can be implemented whereby (il)legitimate forms of use and abuse can be differentiated and associated boundaries inscribed through physical and discursive means (Li, 2014: Steinberg, 2018). Private NSE actors have sought to influence these legislative processes through lobbying, advertising materials, press conferences, business forums, and public and private talks. This has culminated in a process of enclosure wherein similar justifications to past enclosures are mobilised and reanimated. Once more, ‘production’ and the ability to ‘work’ a resource are becoming the modus operandi through which ownership over the common is being exerted (Wood, 2017), finding explicit articulation in the US SPACE Act 2015. The mobilisation and perpetuation of this discourse is coupled with the perversion of the common heritage principle. To refrain from extracting minerals throughout Outer Space is to (supposedly) ‘waste’ their potential and deprive future generations of the benefits this industry purports to provide (Steinberg, 2018). However, despite the enthusiasm of asteroid mining advocates, the proposed extractive industry is not unproblematic. Whilst the narratives surrounding asteroid mining frame this industry’s future as something certain – discussed in advertising material, websites, and NSE circles in the affirmative – there are still many unanswered questions. Aside from issues of technological and fiscal viability, uncertainty remains surrounding ownership, land rights, and whose future this industry speaks of, for, and mobilises. Due to such uncertainties, actors with vested interests are seeking to enclose the Global Common of Outer Space, ‘opening’ the ‘final frontier’ to what some commentators are referring to as a modern Gold Rush (Cofield, 2016: Elvis and Milligan, 2019: Pandya, 2019). This pursual of enclosure relies – broadly speaking – on the same underlying principle(s) as the enclosure of commons historically and lobbying efforts have resulted in these arguments appearing in legislation in several countries 3. These manoeuvres to privatise Outer Space rely not only on the enclosure of physical and legislative places but also seek to enclose imaginative spaces through the process(es) of disimagination. Broadly conceived, disimagination is a process that curtails our ability to think critically and imagine new futures through cultural apparatuses and public pedagogies designed to erase the multiplicity of historical realities that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). Whilst this concept has been used in Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the destruction of concentration camp materials and Giroux’s work on critical pedagogy and civic rights, the process of disimagination is operating within and upon discourses of Outer Space, as I discuss later in this piece. These attempts at disimagination are not going unchallenged, however, with Ethnofuturist works disrupting the oftentimes de facto futures of Outer Space and asteroid mining. Ethnofuturism critically responds to the disimagination process as it combines the Ethno- (the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012). Consequently, Ethnofuturism can be construed as a process by and through which histories that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ are reinvigorated and mobilised to (re)produce alternative discourses of futurity. ‘Ethnofuturism’ here is used as an umbrella term that contains within it futurisms from a variety of groups and people. Examples of such futurisms include, but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, Aotearoa futurism, Cambrofuturism, and Sinofuturism. The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise these futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ 4 oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them. The process of disimagination selectively edits the historical narrative, removing certain voices, modes of resistance, and alternative accounts, distorting the ability to imagine futures outside of the EuroAmerican neoliberal present 6 (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). It is through the processes of disimagination that the condition of capitalist realism is enabled – a state of affairs wherein it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009 7). Consequently, the futures curated, maintained, and promoted by NSE actors are structured through a white-ethnocentric rendition of history. The resultant imaginaries and narratives implicitly and explicitly draw upon familiar tropes of white settler colonialism, such as enclosure, working land to produce ‘value’, and the displacing of indigenous/non-Western onto-epistemological frameworks, if not the people themselves 8 (Bhabha and Comaroff, 2002: Hesse, 2002: Loomba et al., 2005: Parry, 2002: Wilkes and Hird, 2019: Wood, 2017: Young, 2001). Through imbibing popular discourses of Outer Space futurity with this history, similar arguments to past enclosures are made. Specifically, that ‘production’ and the ability to ‘work’ a resource operates as the basis through which ownership may be exerted 9; extractive industries not taking anything away but adding something, and issues coming to centre upon not occupancy or fruitful use but relative value (Wood, 2017). In 1982 Bezos said in his high school valedictorian speech that “the Earth is finite and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.” His views have not changed much since then. “Within a few centuries we’ll be using all of the solar energy that impacts the Earth,” he told a crowd at an event hosted by Blue Origin. “That’s an actual limit.” This Malthusian logic underpins his arguments about the inevitability of humanity’s growth and the necessity of expanding into space. There are short-term problems, he explains, such as poverty and pollution, and there are long-term problems, such as running out of energy. If we do not want to become “a civilization of rationing and stasis,” Bezos warns, we must expand to the stars where “resources are, for all practical purposes, infinite.” For Musk space colonization is also a means to preserve human civilization, albeit as a hedge against eventual extinction. “I don’t have an immediate doomsday prophecy,” he told an international conference in 2016, “but history suggests that there will be some extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and multi-planetary species.” Whereas Bezos emphasizes the cyclical logic of capitalist growth—we must expand, in order to keep expanding—Musk is more explicit in his plans for colonial settlement. One of his proposals—to allow individuals to purchase one-way tickets to Mars which can be paid off through promised jobs in the new colony— has been called Martian indentured servitude. “Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time,” Musk explained, so “jobs would not be in short supply.” And while Bezos imagines that humans will be able to travel between Earth and space often, Musk contends that the Mars colony should be self-sufficient, able “to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason.” And while Bezos imagines that humans will be able to travel between Earth and space often, Musk contends that the Mars colony should be self-sufficient, able “to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason.” Imperialist conceptions of ownership transform space into an “empty frontier” where certain individuals can project their political dreams. For two entrepreneurs whose businesses have been lauded as exceptionally visionary, their celestial utopias stand out for their lack of political creativity and awareness. Bezos’s notion that imperial expansion is the only way to support an ever-growing population is an old colonialist appeal, now repackaged for the stars. The infinite need for resources, as well as the “poverty and pollution” that Bezos dismisses as short-term problems, are deeply enmeshed in capitalism’s cycles of extraction and are currently causing Earth’s climate crisis. Given the green-orientation of his enterprises, Musk is presumably aware of the climate crisis—or at least the opportunities it presents for government funding. Yet he has not explicitly named climate change as one of the potential “extinction events” that a Mars colony might protect against. Putting aside the question of whether terraforming Mars is actually feasible—for the record, a Nature Astronomy article suggests it is not—settling space won’t be cost-free to Earth. As science writer Shannon Stirone pointed out in The Atlantic, “Mars has a very thin atmosphere; it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays; it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero . . . . For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground.” The environmental and human destruction necessary to make space habitable would dwarf any technological or political response needed to stop the climate crisis now. And—like capitalism and climate change—the impacts of colonizing space will be far worse for some rather than others, particularly in the Global South. For example, when Indonesian president Joko Widodo offered SpaceX the island of Biak in Papua, home to an ongoing secessionist campaign, local communities protested that the building of the launch station would cause vast ecological damage and community displacement. They had reason to worry. This is precisely what happened in Boca Chica, a small town on the southern tip of Texas where SpaceX had built a previous launch site. After SpaceX moved into town, residents of the Texas community were pushed out from their homes as the area became unsafe due to rocket activity, which has since damaged a wildlife refuge in the area. SpaceX has offered to purchase residents’ homes, but below the price many think is fair. An email from SpaceX to Boca Chica holdouts stated, “As the scale and frequency of spaceflight activities at the site continue to accelerate, your property will frequently fall within established hazard zones in which no civilians will be permitted to remain, in order to comply with all federal and other public safety regulations.” SpaceX’s impact on the area demonstrated little concern for its displacement and damage of the local community. While we all may use, explore, or research space, no state can claim to own it—though this does not mean states will not try. Musk and Bezos rely on the notion that colonizing space somehow differs from colonizing Earth. Implicit in their arguments is the belief that it was not the systems of colonial-capitalism, but rather the context surrounding their implementation, that wreaked havoc in the past. Thus, I affirm: Jones Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. I confront the appropriation through Ethno-futurism, a method that emphasizes critical thinking by confronting capitalism and colonialism. Despite the seeming dominance of the NSE discourses of Outer Space futurity in the popular imaginary and the apparent effectiveness of the disimagination process vis-à-vis these futures, they are not unchallenged. Instead, the hegemonic imaginary of EuroAmerican futurism is disrupted and challenged via the provocations and (re)conceptualisations offered through Ethnofuturist writings and artwork 10. If we understand Ethnofuturism at its most basic – an imaginative process that engages the Ethno- (referring to the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed as the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012) – and accept that texts are not neutral but socio-political artifacts (Aitken, 2005: Driver, 2005: Kitchin and Kneale, 2001: Kneale and Kitchin, 2002: Fairclough, 1992: 2001), then we can look upon Ethnofuturist works that draw upon non-Western histories and cultural specificities as sites wherein – and whereby – the hegemony of the EuroAmerican onto-epistemological framework is agitated, contested, and refuted 11. The ability of Ethnofuturist work to disrupt the normative discourses of Outer Space is described by Nalo Hopkinson in their introduction to the short story collection So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasty. Hopkinson succinctly relays that: “Arguably, one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives, and as I’ve said elsewhere, for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story, it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere” (2011; p.7). In creating artwork that draws upon histories and experiences other than those embedded within the ethnocentric discourses of NSE imaginaries, Ethnofuturism operates as a powerful space wherein ‘traditional’ conceptions of extraterrestrial extractivism can be critiqued, frustrated, and reimagined (Quan, 2017). These challenges are presented through multiple media, including art (e.g. Curtis et al., 2018: Tate, 2020), literature (e.g. Hopkinson and Mehan, 2011), music (e.g. Alien Weaponry, Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape (RPMfm, 2014), Mbongwana Star, Patea Maori Club), film (see The Walker (2020) for a list of indigenous short films and Clark (2015)), and much more. Through challenging the normative discourse of Outer Space futurity – where the familiar tropes of history and enclosure are meted out once more – Ethnofuturism offers us a means of thinking outside of this framework, asking and imagining what other futures may be possible and how these may be thought and done differently. Ethnofuturism, therefore, is a fertile area by and through which we may attempt to decolonise the future – both conceptually and in practice. It provides a space wherein Eurocentric futurity – informed through a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’ that (re)creates and perpetuates a totalising concept of ‘humanity’ – is disrupted and problematised, asking whose future is being spoken of and for. Sullivan Ethnofuturism has allowed different identity groups to come together under the guise of their work – empirics prove. The term “ethnofuturisms” refers to the ways in which marginalized groups are able to re-imagine their identities in society through various forms of literature and may speak to how they have sought to claim the future as a site of liberation and potential. Ethnofuturisms are often presented through the genres of science or speculative fiction, since those each allow the author space to use all aspects of the creative landscape to make a statement about our past and present. “This interdisciplinary symposium signals an opportunity for us to take stock of the important scholarly and cultural work that has made it possible to think about something like ‘ethnofuturisms’ and to grapple, more broadly, with the stakes surrounding ‘futurisms’ as a genre, politics, and mode of being-in-the-world,” according to the symposium’s website. The topic at hand is multifaceted to say the least, which is why English Assistant Professors Frances Tran and John Ribó—who have collaborated with English Professor Aaron Jaffe in the planning of this symposium—have worked on this event since 2018. Together, they have created an experience that they hope will be engaging, interactive, and influential to all those who attend. “In many ways this symposium highlights specific literary and artistic modes deployed by writers and artists of color to imagine themselves and their communities back into futures from which they’ve often been erased or in which they are often portrayed as the monstrous or inhuman other,” Ribó explains. “We wanted to organize this symposium to bring diverse scholars together to critique and to analyze these practices and to learn from one another.” The symposium featured a slew of FSU faculty members and graduate students and others from outside of the English department. This includes Assistant Professor Jeannine Murray-Román of the Department of Modern Languages, Associate Professor Kristin Dowell of the Department of Art History, along with other experts from FSU, Tallahassee Community College, and the Tallahassee area in general. “We each picked one person to invite to speak,” Tran says. “I picked Dr. Aimee Bahng… who I connected with through the Association for Asian American… I thought that she’d be a great person to bring in since I introduced her work in my graduate course on Visionary Fiction last spring. Professor Ribó chose Dr. Cathryn Merla-Watson, who specializes in Latinx speculative fiction.” Additionally, Susana M. Morris, associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication from Georgia Tech, delivered Friday evening’s closing keynote talk, titled “Afrofuturism, Joy, and Resistance.” Morris’ work in the past has focused on Afrofuturism and its influences on our world through movies, media, and literature, along with other forms of communication. She related her extensive knowledge to some of the readings discussed over the course of the symposium, following a panel discussion on Ethnofuturisms as Pedagogy. Tran and Ribó appreciated the flow to the symposium, with smooth transitions between the many overarching themes and ideas that panelists and audience members examined throughout. At the heart of the symposium, however, were the discussions and ideas that are raised by the material. The attendees heard people’s input regarding ethnofuturisms, and the organizers encouraged people to expand their scope of knowledge on the subject. Ethno-futurism became more and more popular. Nowadays ethno-futurism is widely discussed and interpreted.5 at the very beginning it was realized as a new style, and then later it was interpreted that ethno-futurism is a new direction in art. today, one of the main ideologists of ethno-futurism, Kuzi sergi, describes it as an ideology that is based on love for one’s own roots, people, culture, and language, with openness to the world. Genisaretskiy evaluates ethno-futurism as a “post-national ethnicity”.6 “an ethnic culture serves as a basis, a source of creativity of the artist. the artist as an active piece of the cultural process inter- prets the tradition and represents the artistic/imaginative product to a society; the artist proves its value, the society perceives artistic interpretation and shows interest concerning the sources that brings demand for the ethnic cultures”.7 The ethno-futuristic movement has had an influence on the participants of those festivals. the initiative to organize festivals proceeds not from above but from below, from ordinary people, teachers, students, schoolchildren, and even from farmers. and this is a very large army of audiences, ordinary villagers, and school pupils. It is the provinces of Russia. This is the animating effect of the light of ethno-futurism. “activity of such creative associations possesses the great practical and scientific values in realization of national and regional components in education, in mobilization of intellectual and creative capacity of the inhabit- ants of the region, in solution of ethical challenges”.8 “Against the politics of disimagination, progressives, workers, educators, young people and others need to develop a new language of radical reform and create new public spheres that provide the pedagogical conditions for critical thought, dialogue, and thoughtful deliberation. At stake here is a notion of pedagogy that both informs the mind and creates the conditions for modes of agency that are critical, informed, engaged, and socially responsible. The radical imagination can be nurtured around the merging of critique and hope, the capacity to connect private troubles with broader social considerations, and the production of alternative formative cultures that provide the preconditions for political engagement and for mobilizing democratic movements toward social change—movements willing to think beyond isolated struggles and the limits of a today’s operative form of predatory capitalism. Frances Fox Piven, Rick Wolfe, Stanley Aronowitz and others point to such a project in their manifesto on the radical imagination. They write:” “This Manifesto looks forward to the creation of a new political Left formation that can overcome fragmentation, and provide a solid basis for many-sided interventions in the current economic, political and social crises that afflict people in all walks of life. The Left must once again offer to young people, people of color, women, workers, activists, intellectuals and newly arrived immigrants places to learn how the capitalist system works in all of its forms of exploitation whether personal, political, or economic. We need to reconstruct a platform to oppose Capital. It must ask in this moment of U.S. global hegemony what are the alternatives to its cruel power over our lives, and those of large portions of the world’s peoples. And the Left formation is needed to offer proposals on how to rebuild a militant, democratic labor movement, strengthen and transform the social movements; and, more generally, provide the opportunity to obtain a broad education that is denied to them by official institutions. We need a political formation dedicated to the proposition that radical theory and practice are inextricably linked, that knowledge without action is impotent, but action without knowledge is blind.36” “We need new vocabularies for resistance and solidarity against the violence of the militarized state and the market, ones that embrace freedom as more than the need to shop or, for that matter, as more than a libertarian concept that is empty of any meaning. Freedom becomes a bankrupt notion when it is removed from the material and symbolic constraints that shape its possibilities as collective experience and a foundational element of democratic agency. What sites are left for fighting against the disimagination machine? We see the promise of such sites in the new media, the alternative press, the uprisings and models of democratic participatory engagement being generated by youthful protesters | 1/29/22 |
JF- Lobbying 1ACTournament: Emory | Round: 2 | Opponent: La Salle TP | Judge: Luke Bagdon Cunningham PRIVATE INTERESTS ARE TAKING OVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS – right-wing corporations are paying to undermine racial education and hide injustice. “The backlash” begins an opinion piece in Newsweek by Parents Defending Education outreach director Erika Sanzi, and these may be the most accurate two words published by those who are attacking “wokeness,” gender studies, and Critical Race Theory. The sad fact is that white backlash has a proven record of effectiveness in American politics and it is once again being employed in the service of right wing corporate interests. The end product desired has less to do with CRT than with spreading disruption, fear, and chaos across America’s most important democratic public institution, schools. According to the Washington Post, as of June 24 CRT (a theory developed in law schools and not well known among most Americans) has exploded on Fox News. The term was heard on Fox only 132 times in 2020 but has been mentioned 1,860 times this year, escalating month by month. The narrative is that grassroots parents groups have discovered the threat CRT poses to their children in schools and have arisen organically across the country to form local parent groups, a movement noticed and captured by websites and the powerful Fox News. The truth is that of an oligarch-funded and coordinated campaign using time tested techniques. He adds: Coincidentally or not in 2017 the civil rights-proclaiming Ms. Rodrigues and the radical right Ms. Sanzi were partners in another venture named Planet Mom, which featured a podcast and proposed radio show. In her paid position at Education Post Ms. Sanzi wrote of Ms. Rodrigues “I consider her a partner in this work. And a friend.” It’s a small planet, after all. The point is not Critical Race Theory, or charter schools, virtual schools, or home schools. The point is to undermine public education, keep taxes low, spread doubt of the efficacy of public goods, and demolish institutions like unions and local school communities that make demands on the Waltons and Kochs of the nation. It is, as Nancy MacLean has said, to put democracy in chains. Diverse-presenting National Parents Union and white backlash Parents Defending Education serve the same cause. Whither We Are Tending and What to Do About It I hope my colleagues in academia continue to speak out about the intellectual contributions of Critical Race Theory and the fine efforts of K-12 educators to provide the kind of schooling all our students need—open and honest about the nation’s race and history and our ongoing challenges, including corporate promoted white backlash. On the other hand, don’t expect any engagement from Nicole Neily or the anti-CRT bard Christopher Rufo, who has helped spike this ridiculous campaign. In a triumphant appearance at the Claremont Institute, Rufo described his annoyance at scholars trying to bait him into a discussion of what CRT really means and proclaimed “I don’t give a shit about this stuff.” (Nine minute mark) As Isaac Kamola has urged, start with follow the money and pursue that relentlessly. There’s a reason groups like PDE and NPU can’t come clean about their funding sources and amounts and that reason is that they know the public is suspicious of the Kochs and Waltons of the world and what’s more, the public and America’s billionaires are on a different page on policy issues. These are corporate generated right wing attacks. Say it. Name names. Come awake to the threat. Recognize what this is and that isn’t just about wokeness or even education but something else Koch and the Waltons can’t say out loud: to destroy the capacity of people to coalesce together and fight for a better life for themselves, a project that offends oligarchs ideologically and threatens their power and pocketbooks. They focus on education because schools have been a fertile locale for white backlash but also a source of great progress, because teachers unions are a barrier to them, and because local community organizations defy them. That means that teachers unions, school boards, superintendents, principals, lunch workers, school bus drivers, custodians, business, parents and students—everyone who serves their local school community—have to recognize that they need to fight together against this assault. In other words, join together to take action—exactly what the Waltons, Kochs, and other radical right billionaires fear. And stand up for a real education for all our children, not the white(wash) backlash being promoted by phony AstroTurf fronts like Parents Defending Education. Remember, fronts are fronting for someone and in this case, fronting for radical right billionaires. Money never sleeps. Follow the money. Consciousness thus has the function here of working to connect the local and the universal, both what is immediately at hand and the structures, systems, and frames that inform and act on both individuals and groups. The need is for teachers to come to position themselves as conscious political actors, in an inherently political reality, and to draw connections between what they experience in their local contexts and how those experiences inform the larger context in which those experiences take place. For Marx, revolutionary consciousness is tied to an understanding of one’s position in relation to the means of production. When workers understand that the owners of the means of production alienate and dehumanize in the pursuit of profits, that this is fundamentally what capitalism functions to do, they can then articulate their aims for liberation with the understanding that the present economic system denies them their capacity to be fully human. For anti-capitalist antiracist pedagogy, this form of revolutionary consciousness is the product of learning and critical engagement with curricula, as outlined above. This consciousness is premised on the ability to see, in both local and global contexts, the present realities of white supremacy and the ways in which the logics of white supremacy function to legitimate capitalist exploitation. It is this ability to see that consciousness offers, not merely having an abstract principle, but rather a self-appropriated ability to read both the word and world in critical ways. Seeing the connection between local manifestations of white supremacy and global manifestations of capitalist abuse as a part of the same overarching system of signs and meaning is the principle aim for anti-capitalist antiracist pedagogy. Importantly, however, this cannot be thought of as merely an intellectual skill, and further cannot be learned through banking methods. These last two points need to be explained in further detail. Consciousness, and critical consciousness in particular, should be thought of less as an ability, and more of a way of being in the world. We can make rules for finding racism in practice, and we could learn those rules and then always be successful at identifying the racist connotations of a particular phrase or practice. But merely being able to name these processes offers us nothing. Rather, being able to name these processes and understanding their historical, social, and political dimension and the ways in which race and racism intersect in myriad other systems and forms of oppression, offers us the ability to not only understand racism, but to orient our lives in opposition to it. This orientation, this way of being, carries with it the profound capacity to act on oppressive realities because it refuses to take any system or reality as an inevitability. That is, no creation of human beings is devoid of context, and if we can understand capitalism, positivism, and instrumental reason as unnatural, as made by human beings, we are able to position ourselves in relation to these systems in ways that enable us to see cracks in the edifice. Consciousness of our oppressive order and the ways in which it has been created for particular aims is the precondition for radical solidarity. Utrata 1 CASH IS KING – the private space industry spends billions lobbying politicians to benefit companies while sidestepping checks – it’s outsourced colonization. In the early years of Blue Origin, Bezos personally funded his company (by selling one billion of Amazon stock per year, he revealed in 2017) and initially focused on space tourism as a potential source of revenue, as well as a way—he claimed—to acclimate people to the idea of space travel. But Bezos watched as Musk’s SpaceX quickly eclipsed his company, both in size and success. Musk had funded SpaceX through a combination of venture capital investment and billions in government contracts. While Blue Origin has never launched a rocket that achieved orbit, SpaceX has been flying NASA cargo to the International Space Station since 2012. Bezos and Musk spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to continue funding their projects, which already receive massive amounts of public money through government contracts. When Tesla received a $1.3 billion tax break to open a battery plant in Nevada in 2014, Bezos sent off an email to a fellow Amazon executive asking why Musk had been so successful at securing big government incentives. But now Bezos has nothing to complain about. Blue Origin routinely competes with SpaceX for contracts, and both companies spend millions lobbying Congress to continue funding these projects. After SpaceX initially won a contract to build a lunar lander, a short-lived amendment to the Endless Frontier Act which would have authorized $10 billion to NASA’s moon program and established a second award was even briefly nicknamed the “Bezos Bailout.” It is true that Musk has a particular talent for securing government funding across his business ventures. In her book The Entrepreneurial State (2013), Mariana Mazzucato debunks the notion that free markets and small states, rather than government investment in technological innovation, create economic success. She documents how Musk’s companies SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity have received billions in government support, including grants, tax breaks, and subsidized loans. On top of that, they have also secured billions more in procurement contracts and direct investments in new technologies from NASA and the Department of Energy. (This government support is not marginal. Tesla only had its first full-year profit in 2020, although Musk has accumulated much of his personal fortune through ownership of the company’s stock.) But this outsourcing of colonization efforts to private corporations is not just a feature of the neoliberal state; corporations have long been embedded in the history of colonization. In the early days of colonization, though companies’ home states often provided them money and legitimacy for their ventures overseas, governments did not always tightly control these endeavors. For instance, the British East India Company—a “company-state,” as coined by Philip Stern—maintained armed forces, waged and declared war, collected taxes, minted coin, and at one point “ruled” over more subjects than the British state itself. As J. C. Sharman and Andrew Phillips noted in Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (2020), “in some cases, company-states came to wield more military and political power than many monarchs of the day.” Today states, not corporations, are perceived to be the truly dangerous actors in space exploration. But corporations have long been embedded in the history of colonization. Company-states were predicated on an understanding of sovereignty as divisible and delegatory, defying what we today consider “public” and “private” power. Compared to company-states at their zenith, even the largest modern-day multinational corporation—and certainly SpaceX and Blue Origin—has significantly less authority, with absolutely no military might to speak of. The monarchies that first granted monopoly charters to these voyaging companies, having evolved into modern states, have also consolidated sovereign authority and gained far more power than their antecedents in previous centuries. Today states, not corporations, are perceived to be the truly dangerous actors in space exploration. Particularly in the context of worsening U.S.-China relations, the militarization of space by states is often posited as the most likely way that celestial encounters may become violent. On this view, if private U.S. companies were to extract commercial resources from asteroids, it would be a much more peaceful prospect than the U.S. Space Force establishing a military base on the moon. However, this framing ignores corporations’ violent histories and the deep connection between private commercial pursuits and systems of capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, though states may help create and participate in these systems, they do not always control the forces they unleash. For example, there was nothing inevitable about the fact that the East India Company came under the control of the British state. Even when it did, it caused devastating impacts on both the places it claimed to “rule” as well as the state that had chartered and owned it, ushering in the age of the British Empire. As historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019), noted, “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company. . . that executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” What role, then, for the state? The frontiersmen of NewSpace tend to think of themselves as libertarians, pioneers beyond the domain of state bureaucracy (see Nelson and Block, 2018). ‘The government should leave the design work and ownership of the product to the private sector', the author of a 2017 report, Capitalism in Space, advocates. ‘The private companies know best how to build their own products to maximize performance while lowering cost' (Zimmerman, 2017, p. 27). One ethnographer notes that ‘politically, right-libertarianism prevails' amongst NewSpace entrepreneurs (Valentine, 2016, p. 1047–1048). Just as Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the opponents to the Iraq War as ‘Old Europe', so too are state entities’ interests in space exploration shrugged off as symptoms of ‘Old Space'. Elon Musk, we are told in a recent biography, unlike the sluggish Big State actors of yore, ‘would apply some of the start-up techniques he’d learned in Silicon Valley to run SpaceX lean and fast…As a private company, SpaceX would also avoid the waste and cost overruns associated with government contractors' (Vance, 2015, p. 114). This libertarianism-in-space has found a willing chorus of academic supporters. The legal scholar Virgiliu Pop introduces the notion of the frontier paradigm (combining laissez-faire economics, market competition, and an individualist ethic) into the domain of space law, claiming that this paradigm has ‘proven its worth on our planet' and will ‘most likely…do so in the extraterrestrial realms' as well (Pop, 2009, p. vi). This frontier paradigm is not entirely new: a ‘Columbus mythology', centering on the ‘noble explorer', was continuously evoked in the United States during the Cold War space race (Dickens and Ormrod, 2016, pp. 79, 162–164). But the entrepreneurial libertarianism of capitalistkind is undermined by the reliance of the entire NewSpace complex on extensive support from the state, ‘a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups' that in the case of Musk’s three main companies (SpaceX, SolarCity Corp., and Tesla) has been underpinned by $4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies (Hirsch, 2015). In the nascent field of space tourism, Cohen (2017) argues that what began as an almost entirely private venture quickly ground to a halt in the face of insurmountable technical and financial obstacles, only solved by piggybacking on large state-run projects, such as selling trips to the International Space Station, against the objections of NASA scientists. The business model of NewSpace depends on the taxpayer’s dollar while making pretensions to individual self-reliance. The vast majority of present-day clients of private aerospace corporations are government clients, usually military in origin. Furthermore, the bulk of rocket launches in the United States take place on government property, usually operated by the US Air Force or NASA. Footnote 13 This inward tension between state dependency and capitalist autonomy is itself a product of neoliberalism’s contradictory demand for a minimal, “slim” state, while simultaneously (and in fact) relying on a state reengineered and retooled for the purposes of capital accumulation (Wacquant, 2012). As Lazzarato writes, ‘To be able to be “laissez-faire”, it is necessary to intervene a great deal' (2017, p. 7). Space libertarianism is libertarian in name only: behind every NewSpace venture looms a thick web of government spending programs, regulatory agencies, public infrastructure, and universities bolstered by research grants from the state. SpaceX would not exist were it not for state-sponsored contracts of satellite launches. Similarly, in 2018, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the famed origin of the World Wide Web—announced that it would launch a ‘responsive launch competition', meaning essentially the reuse of launch vehicles, representing an attempt by the state to ‘harness growing commercial capabilities' and place them in the service of the state’s interest in ensuring ‘national security' (Foust, 2018b). This libertarianism has been steadily growing in the nexus between Silicon Valley, Stanford University, Wall Street, and the Washington political establishment, which tend to place a high value on Randian ‘objectivism' and participate in a long American intellectual heritage of individualistic ‘bootstrapping' and (allegedly) gritty self-reliance. But as Nelson and Block (2018, p. 189–197) recognize, one of the central symbolic operations of capitalistkind resides in concealing its reliance on the state by mobilizing the charm of its entrepreneurial constituents and the spectacle of space. There is a case to be made for the idea that SpaceX and its ilk resemble semi-private corporations like the British East India Company. The latter, “incorporated by royal charter from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 to trade in silk and spices, and other profitable Indian commodities,” recruited soldiers and built a ‘commercial business that quickly became a business of conquest' (Tharoor, 2017). SpaceX, too, is increasingly imbricated with an attempt on the part of a particular state, the United States, to colonize and appropriate resources derived from a particular area, that of outer space; it, too, depends on the infrastructure, contracts, and regulatory environment that thus far only a state seems able to provide. Its private character, like that of the East India Company, is troubled by being deeply embedded in the state. As one commentator has observed of SpaceX, ‘If there’s a consistent charge against Elon Musk and his high-flying companies…it’s that they’re not really examples of independent, innovative market capitalism. Rather, they’re government contractors, dependent on taxpayer money to stay afloat' (cit. Nelson and Block, 2018, p. 189). Utrata 2 THAT MEANS REGULATION FAILS – states won’t control the companies they’re in bed with, since that costs them profits. Particularly in the context of worsening U.S.-China relations, the militarization of space by states is often posited as the most likely way that celestial encounters may become violent. On this view, if private U.S. companies were to extract commercial resources from asteroids, it would be a much more peaceful prospect than the U.S. Space Force establishing a military base on the moon. However, this framing ignores corporations’ violent histories and the deep connection between private commercial pursuits and systems of capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, though states may help create and participate in these systems, they do not always control the forces they unleash. For example, there was nothing inevitable about the fact that the East India Company came under the control of the British state. Even when it did, it caused devastating impacts on both the places it claimed to “rule” as well as the state that had chartered and owned it, ushering in the age of the British Empire. As historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019), noted, “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company. . . that executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” As contemporary companies set out to colonize space, we should ask whether modern states have a better grasp on how to control corporations and the violence that may result from battles over who ought to rule these settlers and resources. Though Blue Origin and SpaceX are indebted to the U.S. government for funding, U.S. regulators’ ability to manage these corporations—especially Musk’s—already appears limited. Musk’s remarks toward U.S. regulators, even those investigating him, are infamous for being outrageous and crude—and his behavior is no less intransigent. For instance, in December of last year, SpaceX refused to comply with Federal Aviation Association (FAA) orders to abort a high-altitude test launch of its Starship rocket after the agency revoked its launch license due to atmospheric conditions. And this was not the first time Musk defied government authority. In May 2020 he re-opened his Tesla factory despite an Alameda county health order to shelter in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, requesting on Twitter that police “only arrest him” if law enforcement took action. His companies have been repeatedly investigated and fined for various other regulatory and safety violations. (Reports have claimed that the Tesla factory does not have proper hazard signage because Musk “does not like the color yellow.”) Is it simply the case that Musk, like many powerful men before him, receives preferential treatment from the state? Or are the state and its regulatory agencies truly unable to control him? Colonial destruction was justified by a specific ideology that made a certain view of the world, and humanity’s role in it, appear natural and inevitable. Musk, for his part, does not seem particularly cowed. After the December rocket launch incident, the FAA announced that additional measures, including having an FAA inspector on site, will be imposed on SpaceX during future launches. In response Musk tweeted on January 28 that the FAA “rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.” For Musk, becoming an inter-planetary species is an existential matter for human civilization, far more important than rules and regulations. Both Bezos and Musk use the language of moral imperative when talking about space colonization: humanity must not merely explore space, but settle it, too. The two engineers can easily explain the technical dimensions of their plans to colonize the cosmos. Though these plans differ—Bezos wants to establish artificial tube-like structures floating close to Earth, whereas Musk wants to terraform Mars—the political philosophies underpinning them are remarkably similar. Both offer utopian visions of humanity in space that attempt to provide technological solutions to the political problems that colonialism and capitalism have caused. In 1982 Bezos said in his high school valedictorian speech that “the Earth is finite and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.” His views have not changed much since then. “Within a few centuries we’ll be using all of the solar energy that impacts the Earth,” he told a crowd at an event hosted by Blue Origin. “That’s an actual limit.” This Malthusian logic underpins his arguments about the inevitability of humanity’s growth and the necessity of expanding into space. There are short-term problems, he explains, such as poverty and pollution, and there are long-term problems, such as running out of energy. If we do not want to become “a civilization of rationing and stasis,” Bezos warns, we must expand to the stars where “resources are, for all practical purposes, infinite.” For Musk space colonization is also a means to preserve human civilization, albeit as a hedge against eventual extinction. “I don’t have an immediate doomsday prophecy,” he told an international conference in 2016, “but history suggests that there will be some extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and multi-planetary species.” Whereas Bezos emphasizes the cyclical logic of capitalist growth—we must expand, in order to keep expanding—Musk is more explicit in his plans for colonial settlement. One of his proposals—to allow individuals to purchase one-way tickets to Mars which can be paid off through promised jobs in the new colony— has been called Martian indentured servitude. “Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time,” Musk explained, so “jobs would not be in short supply.” And while Bezos imagines that humans will be able to travel between Earth and space often, Musk contends that the Mars colony should be self-sufficient, able “to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason.” And while Bezos imagines that humans will be able to travel between Earth and space often, Musk contends that the Mars colony should be self-sufficient, able “to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason.” Imperialist conceptions of ownership transform space into an “empty frontier” where certain individuals can project their political dreams. For two entrepreneurs whose businesses have been lauded as exceptionally visionary, their celestial utopias stand out for their lack of political creativity and awareness. Bezos’s notion that imperial expansion is the only way to support an ever-growing population is an old colonialist appeal, now repackaged for the stars. The infinite need for resources, as well as the “poverty and pollution” that Bezos dismisses as short-term problems, are deeply enmeshed in capitalism’s cycles of extraction and are currently causing Earth’s climate crisis. Given the green-orientation of his enterprises, Musk is presumably aware of the climate crisis—or at least the opportunities it presents for government funding. Yet he has not explicitly named climate change as one of the potential “extinction events” that a Mars colony might protect against. Putting aside the question of whether terraforming Mars is actually feasible—for the record, a Nature Astronomy article suggests it is not—settling space won’t be cost-free to Earth. As science writer Shannon Stirone pointed out in The Atlantic, “Mars has a very thin atmosphere; it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays; it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero . . . . For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground.” The environmental and human destruction necessary to make space habitable would dwarf any technological or political response needed to stop the climate crisis now. And—like capitalism and climate change—the impacts of colonizing space will be far worse for some rather than others, particularly in the Global South. For example, when Indonesian president Joko Widodo offered SpaceX the island of Biak in Papua, home to an ongoing secessionist campaign, local communities protested that the building of the launch station would cause vast ecological damage and community displacement. They had reason to worry. This is precisely what happened in Boca Chica, a small town on the southern tip of Texas where SpaceX had built a previous launch site. After SpaceX moved into town, residents of the Texas community were pushed out from their homes as the area became unsafe due to rocket activity, which has since damaged a wildlife refuge in the area. SpaceX has offered to purchase residents’ homes, but below the price many think is fair. An email from SpaceX to Boca Chica holdouts stated, “As the scale and frequency of spaceflight activities at the site continue to accelerate, your property will frequently fall within established hazard zones in which no civilians will be permitted to remain, in order to comply with all federal and other public safety regulations.” SpaceX’s impact on the area demonstrated little concern for its displacement and damage of the local community. While we all may use, explore, or research space, no state can claim to own it—though this does not mean states will not try. Musk and Bezos rely on the notion that colonizing space somehow differs from colonizing Earth. Implicit in their arguments is the belief that it was not the systems of colonial-capitalism, but rather the context surrounding their implementation, that wreaked havoc in the past. Skibba 1 Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. I defend implementation of the topic through a coordinated treaty that bars ownership of space for commercial gain, modeled on the Antarctic Treaty of 1961. The Biden administration has so far focused its space policy not on treaties but on "norms," non-legally binding principles that they hope will evolve into international agreements with teeth. But it's hard to imagine that enforceable international space policies will be adopted unless Biden explicitly and enthusiastically calls for them, while urging Russian and Chinese leaders to do the same. More likely, whatever endeavors the space industry and military decide to pursue will retroactively become policy. This is already playing out in debates about the private harvesting of resources from the moon and asteroids, the types of spacecraft companies can put in orbit, and the kinds of space and anti-satellite weapons militaries can develop. If we were to design a new space treaty that would preserve space primarily as a place for exploration and collaboration rather than for war and commercial gain, what would it look like? It would coordinate travel and limit traffic in busy orbits in the atmosphere while also taking steps to limit the creation of space debris. (Cleaning up the mess already clogging low-Earth orbit is another story entirely.) It would also build on the Moon Agreement, prohibiting the deployment and testing of weapons — including electronic weapons — in the atmosphere. And it would prohibit deploying and testing any weapons in space, not just on the moon or other celestial bodies. It would create an independent, international organization to review proposals for mining resources and establishing colonies on the moon, Mars, and beyond. This sounds ambitious — and it is — but it's achievable. The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 enshrines many of the same principles for activity on Antarctica, and it still works six decades later. Public opinion on space seems to be shifting, too, with growing calls to jettison colonialist views of space exploration in favor of more egalitarian approaches. If scientists, non-governmental groups, space environmentalists, and other stakeholders put pressure on the Biden administration, it could become politically feasible for the president to take a stand and jumpstart space diplomacy with the U.S.'s rivals. To the extent that it would help make space exploration sustainable, peaceful, and beneficial to all humanity, it would be worth the cost in political capital. We only have one atmosphere, one moon, and one night sky to cherish. Skibba 2 THE TIME HAS COME – global action is key for any hope of change, and existing rules are vastly outdated. SPACE IS MUCH BUSIER than it used to be. Rockets are launching more and more satellites into orbit every year. SpaceX, the private company founded by Elon Musk, blasted more than 800 satellites into space in 2020 alone. Extraterrestrial tourism is about to take off, led by space barons Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, two of whom have already taken their first private space outings. The frenetic activity of space agencies and space companies around the world will extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, too. Within a few years, the moon will see many more landers, rovers, and even boots on the lunar ground. So will Mars and eventually, perhaps even some asteroids. It’s an exciting time, but also a contentious one. An arena once dominated by the U.S. and Russia has seen the arrival of China and numerous other countries, with several nations establishing both a scientific and military presence in space. A burgeoning space industry, mostly led by U.S.-based companies, is angling for opportunities to monetize Earth-observing satellites, expensive visits to the edge of space, and trips to the moon with robotic and human passengers. Space junk clutters the atmosphere. Rival countries and companies hurtle satellites through the same orbits, and they eye the same key spots on the moon where water could be harvested from ice. Anti-satellite weapons tests by China and India that have flung debris into orbit illustrate just how precarious space is. All that is to say, things have changed considerably in the more than half century since international space diplomats hammered out the Outer Space Treaty, the agreement that continues to serve as the world’s basic framework on international space law. Before space conflicts erupt or collisions in the atmosphere make space travel unsustainable — and before pollution irreversibly tarnishes our atmosphere or other worlds — we need a new international rulebook. It’s time for the Biden administration to work with other space powers and negotiate an ambitious new space treaty for the new century. The Outer Space Treaty was deliberately written ambiguously. It outlaws nukes and other weapons of mass destruction being deployed in space, but makes no mention of lasers, missiles, and cyber weapons. The accord appears to ban private property in space and states that no nation can claim a piece of space or lunar territory as their own, but it does not explicitly restrict the extraction of resources like water and minerals. The Moon Agreement, which went into force in 1984, went further. It states that countries are required to inform others if they have spacecraft entering the same orbit. It declares that the exploration and use of the moon must be done for the benefit of everyone. Under the agreement, Moon explorers have to take care of the lunar environment as well. And importantly, it forbids the claiming of extraterrestrial resources as property. However, only 18 countries are party to the sweeping treaty, none of them space-faring nations. In recent years, policies on space law have taken an industry-friendly turn, particularly in the U.S. The Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, also known as the Space Act, which, in theory, allows American companies to mine the moon and other celestial bodies however they wish and to keep the resources. Other countries, like Luxembourg, have followed suit. It states that countries are required to inform others if they have spacecraft entering the same orbit. It declares that the exploration and use of the moon must be done for the benefit of everyone. Under the agreement, Moon explorers have to take care of the lunar environment as well. And importantly, it forbids the claiming of extraterrestrial resources as property. However, only 18 countries are party to the sweeping treaty, none of them space-faring nations. In recent years, policies on space law have taken an industry-friendly turn, particularly in the U.S. The Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, also known as the Space Act, which, in theory, allows American companies to mine the moon and other celestial bodies however they wish and to keep the resources. Other countries, like Luxembourg, have followed suit. In 2020, the Trump administration went further, proposing the industry-friendly Artemis Accords, an attempt to further push the case for granting companies property rights in space. The accords comprised bilateral agreements with just 12 countries — notably without Russia and China, and without the involvement of the United Nations or any other international institution — putting them outside international space law. More than half a century after humans first set foot on the moon, there remains no clearly established, agreed-upon rules governing space activity. In the absence of such a framework, the U.S. has embraced a de facto “launch first and ask questions later” strategy. The lack of international cooperation is one reason engineers were so caught off guard in 2019, when satellites launched by SpaceX and the European Space Agency nearly crashed into one another. Experts in space law can’t even agree on major questions such as what kind of responsibility space actors have to keep space clean and uncontaminated with debris, as there’s really no framework in place. The Biden administration has so far focused its space policy not on treaties but on “norms,” non-legally binding principles that they hope will evolve into international agreements with teeth. But it’s hard to imagine that enforceable international space policies will be adopted unless Biden explicitly and enthusiastically calls for them, while urging Russian and Chinese leaders to do the same. More likely, whatever endeavors the space industry and military decide to pursue will retroactively become policy. This is already playing out in debates about the private harvesting of resources from the moon and asteroids, the types of spacecraft companies can put in orbit, and the kinds of space and anti-satellite weapons militaries can develop. More than half a century after humans first set foot on the moon, there remains no clearly established, agreed-upon rules governing space activity. As Bezos and Musk extol the virtues of using public money to move humanity into the stars, we should ask: Who are these colonies for? The ideals guiding billionaires’ race to space are not new. Lofty utopian visions have often obscured violent processes that prioritize abstract visions of “human civilization” over some human lives. For his part, Bezos looks at this as a utilitarian calculation, a numbers game. If humanity expands into space, he urges, “trillions of humans” can prosper, “which means thousands of Einsteins or Mozarts.” He fails to acknowledge that the genius of those future Einsteins and Mozarts exists now, on Earth, but unrealized and unrecognized in the very cycles of poverty Bezos dismisses as a short-term problem. Furthermore, and more importantly, the value of human life should not be based on some arbitrary utilitarian calculation of humans’ intellectual contribution to “civilization” or their ability to replicate the legacies of two white men. Musk is more explicit about his willingness to sacrifice human life. Mars is “not for the faint of heart,” he has pronounced. There’s a “good chance you’ll die. And it’s going to be tough, tough going. But it’ll be pretty glorious if it works out.” In fact, his belief in the necessity of human sacrifice for this glorious future was openly celebrated in his Saturday Night Live skit “Chad on Mars” in which a Martian settler embarks on a suicide mission after a technical malfunction in the colony’s oxygen distribution systems. In the clip Musk remains safely in command back on Earth, thanking the doomed settler on behalf of humanity as his demise is broadcast live worldwide. When the settler perishes at the end of the skit, Musk shrugs his shoulders and walks away, nonchalantly reminding his team, “Well, I did say people were going to die.” While Bezos and Musk are right that colonizing space will not result in the genocide of nonexistent extraterrestrial populations, the colonial destruction of indigenous communities was but one component in a global regime of racial violence. Indeed, the labor needed to support the system of colonial-capitalism in the United States fueled the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade. In pursuit of America’s “manifest destiny” along the Western frontier, white railroad company owners brutally exploited Asian migrants. One in ten Chinese laborers died building the transcontinental railroad. It is no coincidence that casual discussions of colonization are happening in an industry that is still dominated by white men. Bezos has said that he first became obsessed with space when he was five years old, watching the Apollo moon landing on television exactly fifty-two years before his plans to launch himself into space. Listening to Bezos and Musk speak about their childhood obsession with rocket ships to adoring crowds, one perceives another reason why two of the richest men on Earth are spending billions in public money to get to space: they think it’s cool. One wonders what the five-year-old Bezos would have thought upon learning that Wernher von Braun, whose work was foundational to the Apollo program, was a former Nazi, or that he used slaves to build his rockets in wartime Germany—20,000 of whom died in his factory. Utopian dreams, even in space, always have a human cost. Utopian dreams, even in space, always have a human cost. Remember that the labor needed to support colonial-capitalism in the United States fueled the atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade. Bezos and Musk’s technological visions of becoming an “interplanetary species” do not answer the political question of what kind of future awaits us (whoever “us” is) in space. | 1/28/22 |
JF- World BuildingTournament: TOC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Memorial DX | Judge: Quinn Hughes Giroux 1 CORPORATE EDUCATION IS TAKING OVER – schools use disimagination to stifle critical thought. Neo-liberalism is a disimagination machine that remakes social identity by turning civic subjects into consuming and marketable subjects. As a public pedagogy, it works aggressively in multiple sites – extending from the new screen culture and mainstream media to the schools – to produce desires, needs and values as a form of second nature, internalized as a habit and common sense. As Doreen Massey (2013) points out: ‘It is an internalisation of “the system” that can potentially corrode our ability to imagine that things could be otherwise’. This is cultural politics with a vengeance, and necessitates a new understanding of culture as an educational force and pedagogy as central to any viable notion of politics. What I am suggesting is that the educative nature of politics calls for new modes of social responsibility, civic engagement and collective struggle. It also calls for the translation of political outrage into civic and moral courage. As Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967) insisted: ‘We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers’. We can update King’s speech to encompass the marginalized, voiceless and victims of our nation who are now represented by the low-income and poor minority youth, who inhabit both the public schools and, increasingly, the prisons. These are the throwaway youth of an authoritarian America who have zero jobs, hopes and futures. They are the excess populations of the new punishing state who disturbingly remind the corporate and financial elite of the need for social provisions, the viability of the public good and those principles of economic life in need of substantial rethinking He adds: Giroux, Henry A. Chaired Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University “When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: a critical pedagogy manifesto.” Policy Futures in Education, Volume 12, Number 4, 2014. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2014.12.4.491 CH Corporate sovereignty has replaced political sovereignty, and the state has become largely an adjunct of banking institutions and financial service industries. Addicted to ‘the political demobilization of the citizenry’ (Wolin, 2008, p. ix), the corporate elite is waging a political backlash against all institutions that serve democracy and foster a culture of questioning, dialogue and dissent. The apostles of neo-liberalism are concerned primarily with turning public schools over to casino capitalism in order to transform them into places where all but the privileged children of the 1 can be disciplined and cleansed of any critical impulses. Instead of learning to become independent thinkers, they acquire the debilitating habits of what might be called a moral and political deficit disorder, which renders them passive and obedient in the face of a society based on massive inequalities in power, wealth and income. The current powerful corporate-based unreform movement is wedded to developing modes of governance, ideologies and pedagogies dedicated to constraining and stunting any possibility for developing among students those critical, creative and collaborative forms of thought and action necessary for participating in a substantive democracy. At the core of the new reforms is a commitment to a pedagogy of stupidity and repression that is geared towards memorization, conformity, passivity and high-stakes testing. Rather than create autonomous, critical and civically engaged students, the un-reformers kill the imagination while depoliticizing all vestiges of teaching and learning. The only language they know is the discourse of profit and the disciplinary language of command. John Taylor Gatto (2002) points to some elements of this pedagogy of repression in his claim that schools teach confusion by ignoring historical and relational contexts. Every topic is taught in isolation and communicated by way of sterile pieces of information that have no shared meanings or context. A pedagogy of repression defines students largely by their shortcomings rather than by their strengths, and in doing so convinces them that the only people who know anything are the experts – increasingly drawn from the ranks of the elite and current business leaders, who embody the new models of leadership under the current regime of neo-liberalism. Great historical leaders who exhibited heightened social consciousness, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, John Dewey, Paulo Freire and Mahatma Gandhi, are relegated to the dustbin of history. Students are taught only to care about themselves and to view any consideration for others as a liability, if not a pathology. Ethical concerns under these circumstances are represented as hindrances to be overcome. Narcissism, along with an unchecked notion of individualism, is the new normal. Under a pedagogy of repression, students are conditioned to unlearn any respect for democracy, justice and what it might mean to connect learning to social change. They are told that they have no rights and that rights are limited only to those who have power. This is a pedagogy that kills the spirit, promotes conformity and is more suited to an authoritarian society than a democracy. What is alarming about the new education un-reformers is not only how their policies have failed, but the degree to which such policies are now embraced by liberals and conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, despite their evident failure.7 The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education study provides a list of such failures which is instructive. Critical pedagogy becomes dangerous in the current historical moment because it emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history. Rather than viewing teaching as a technical practice, pedagogy in the broadest critical sense is premised on the assumption that learning is not about memorizing dead knowledge and skills associated with learning for the test, but engaging in a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neo-liberalism, militarism and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive democracy, recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial and gendered inequalities. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must be understood as central to politics itself and, rather than disconnect public education from larger social, economic and political issues, it must be connected to such forces as part of a wider crisis of both education and democracy. At the very least, education must be viewed as part of an emancipatory project that rejects the privatization and corporatization of public schools, and the tax and finance forces that support iniquitous school systems. For pedagogy to matter, it must support a culture and the relations of power that provide teachers with a sense of autonomy and control over the conditions of their labor. Teachers must be viewed as public intellectuals and a valuable social resource, and the conditions of their labor and autonomy must be protected. In this instance, the fight to preserve labor unions must be viewed as central to preserving the rights and working conditions necessary for public school teachers to teach with dignity under conditions that respect rather than degrade them. Critical pedagogy must reject teaching being subordinated to the dictates of standardization, ‘measurement mania’ and high-stakes testing. The latter are part of a pedagogy of repression and conformity, and have nothing to do with an education for empowerment. Central to the call for a critical pedagogy and the formative and institutional culture that makes it possible is the need to reconfigure government spending and to call for less spending on death and war, and more funding for education and the social programs that make it possible as a foundation for a democratic society. Schools are about more than measurable utility, the logic of instrumentality, abject testing and mind-numbing training. In fact, the latter have little to do with critical education and pedagogy, and must be rejected as part of an austerity and neo-liberal project that is deeply antiintellectual, authoritarian and anti-democratic. As a moral and political project, pedagogy is crucial for creating the agents necessary to live in, govern and struggle for a radical democracy. Moreover, it is important to recognize not only how education and pedagogy are connected to and implicated in the production of specific agents and a particular view of the present and future, but also how knowledge, values and desires, and social relations are always implicated in power. Power and ideology permeate all aspects of education and become a valuable resource when critically engaged around issues that problematize the relationship between authority and freedom, ethics and knowledge, and language and experience, reading texts differently, and exploring the dynamics of cultural power. Critical pedagogy addresses power as a relationship in which conditions are produced that allow students to engage in a culture of questioning, to raise and address urgent, disturbing questions about the society in which they live, and to define in part the questions that can be asked and the disciplinary borders that can be crossed. Education as a democratic project is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. Teachers need to be able to work together, collaborate, work with the community and engage in research that informs their teaching. In this instance, critical pedagogy refuses the atomizing structure of teaching that informs traditional and market-driven notions of pedagogy. Moreover, critical pedagogy should provide students with the knowledge, modes of literacy, skills, critique, social responsibility and civic courage needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens who are willing to fight for a sustainable and just society. Jones 1 IT’S A NEW FRONTIER – companies are racing to enclose outer space for maximum profit. Along with increasing interest from private actors, discussions surrounding the enclosure of Outer Space – and asteroid mining more specifically – has seen growing coverage in recent years, several countries having passed legislation to begin legalising and encouraging extraterrestrial extractivism 5. Manoeuvres to enclose the extraterrestrial common and begin mining operations necessitate the establishment of a rights regime to ensure any disputes over access and ownership can be resolved. This opens a regulatory ‘frontier’ through which issues of land tenure and ownership can be thrashed out, taking on significance through its ability to greatly influence influxes of capital into these operations and mineralogical deposits (Bridge, 2004). Through the regulatory enclosure of Outer Space, a regime of exclusion can be implemented whereby (il)legitimate forms of use and abuse can be differentiated and associated boundaries inscribed through physical and discursive means (Li, 2014: Steinberg, 2018). Private NSE actors have sought to influence these legislative processes through lobbying, advertising materials, press conferences, business forums, and public and private talks. This has culminated in a process of enclosure wherein similar justifications to past enclosures are mobilised and reanimated. Once more, ‘production’ and the ability to ‘work’ a resource are becoming the modus operandi through which ownership over the common is being exerted (Wood, 2017), finding explicit articulation in the US SPACE Act 2015. The mobilisation and perpetuation of this discourse is coupled with the perversion of the common heritage principle. To refrain from extracting minerals throughout Outer Space is to (supposedly) ‘waste’ their potential and deprive future generations of the benefits this industry purports to provide (Steinberg, 2018). However, despite the enthusiasm of asteroid mining advocates, the proposed extractive industry is not unproblematic. Whilst the narratives surrounding asteroid mining frame this industry’s future as something certain – discussed in advertising material, websites, and NSE circles in the affirmative – there are still many unanswered questions. Aside from issues of technological and fiscal viability, uncertainty remains surrounding ownership, land rights, and whose future this industry speaks of, for, and mobilises. Due to such uncertainties, actors with vested interests are seeking to enclose the Global Common of Outer Space, ‘opening’ the ‘final frontier’ to what some commentators are referring to as a modern Gold Rush (Cofield, 2016: Elvis and Milligan, 2019: Pandya, 2019). This pursual of enclosure relies – broadly speaking – on the same underlying principle(s) as the enclosure of commons historically and lobbying efforts have resulted in these arguments appearing in legislation in several countries 3. These manoeuvres to privatise Outer Space rely not only on the enclosure of physical and legislative places but also seek to enclose imaginative spaces through the process(es) of disimagination. Broadly conceived, disimagination is a process that curtails our ability to think critically and imagine new futures through cultural apparatuses and public pedagogies designed to erase the multiplicity of historical realities that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). Whilst this concept has been used in Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the destruction of concentration camp materials and Giroux’s work on critical pedagogy and civic rights, the process of disimagination is operating within and upon discourses of Outer Space, as I discuss later in this piece. These attempts at disimagination are not going unchallenged, however, with Ethnofuturist works disrupting the oftentimes de facto futures of Outer Space and asteroid mining. Ethnofuturism critically responds to the disimagination process as it combines the Ethno- (the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012). Consequently, Ethnofuturism can be construed as a process by and through which histories that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ are reinvigorated and mobilised to (re)produce alternative discourses of futurity. ‘Ethnofuturism’ here is used as an umbrella term that contains within it futurisms from a variety of groups and people. Examples of such futurisms include, but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, Aotearoa futurism, Cambrofuturism, and Sinofuturism. The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise these futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ 4 oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them. Neoliberalism also connects power and knowledge to the technologies, strategies, tactics, and pedagogical practices key to the management and ordering of populations and to controlling consent. Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality is crucial for understanding not only how modes of thought, rationality, and persuasion are linked to technologies of governing but also how any understanding of government must consider the ways power works to create “the conditions of consensus or the prerequisites of acceptance.”26 As Thomas Lemke has pointed out, neoliberal modes of governmentality are important for developing the connection “between technologies of the self and technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject and the formation of the state.”27 As a powerful mode of public pedagogy, neoliberal ideology is located, produced, and disseminated from many institutional and cultural sites, ranging from the shrill noise of largely conservative talk radio to the halls of academia and the screen culture of popular media.28 Mobilizing modes of official knowledge, mass-mediated desires, and strategies of power, these sites provide an indispensable political service in coupling “technologies of the self and neoliberal political rationalities”29 as part of a broader effort to transform politics, restructure power relations, and produce an array of narratives and disciplinary measures. 30 As neoliberalism extends into all aspects of daily life, the boundaries of the cultural, economic, and political become porous and leak into each other, sharing the task, though in different ways, of producing identities, goods, knowledge, modes of communication, affective investments, and many other aspects of social life and the social order.31 Fundamental to the construction of the neoliberal subject is the acceptance of this official set of orthodoxies: the public sphere, if not the very notion of the social, is a pathology; consumerism is the most important obligation of citizenship; freedom is an utterly privatized affair that legitimates the primacy of property rights over public priorities; the social state is bad; all public difficulties are individually determined; and all social problems, now individualized, can be redressed by private solutions. The undermining of social solidarities and collective structures along with the collapsing of public issues into private concerns is one of the most damning elements of neoliberal rationality. Zygmunt Bauman elucidates this issue in the following comment: “In our ‘society of individuals’ all the messes into which one can get are assumed to be self-made and all the hot water into which one can fall is proclaimed to have been boiled by the hapless failures of those who have fallen into it. For the good and the bad that fill one’s life a person has only himself or herself to thank or to blame. And the way the ‘whole-life-story’ is told raises this assumption to the rank of an axiom.”32 Once again, any notion of collective goals designed to deepen and expand the meaning of freedom and democracy as part of the vocabulary of the public good is derided as taxing-and-spending big government liberalism or simply dismissed as socialism—an argument that the Republican Party uses constantly to rebuff every element of the stimulus plans proposed by the Obama administration. More specifically, “collective goals such as redistribution, public health, and the wider public good have no place in this landscape of individual preferences.”33 Instead, neoliberal theory and practice give rise to the replacement of the social state with a market/punishing state in which political rights are strictly limited; economic rights are deregulated and privatized; and social rights are replaced by the call to individual preference schemes and self-reliance. Within the impoverished vocabulary of privatization, individualism, and excessive materialism that promises to maximize choice and to minimize taxation, the new citizen-consumer bids a hasty retreat from those public spheres that view critique as a democratic value, collective responsibility as fundamental to the nurturing of democracy, and the deepening and expanding of collective protections as a legitimate function of the state. Defined largely by “the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems,”34 the public domain is emptied of the democratic ideals, discourses, and identities needed to address important considerations such as universal health care, ecologically responsible mass transit, affordable housing with ethical lending practices, subsidized care for the young and elderly, and government efforts to reduce carbon emissions and invest in new forms of energy. As safety nets and social services are being hollowed out and communities crumble and give way to individualized, one-man archipelagos, it is increasingly difficult to develop social movements that can act in concert to effect policies to meet the basic needs of citizens and to maintain the social investments needed to provide life-sustaining services. In order to foreground the connection between the emergence of a neoliberal Gilded Age and what I call the “politics of disposability”—a politics in which matters of life, death, and survival become central— currently on display in U.S. policies at home and abroad,35 I want to draw attention to yet another set of narratives operating in public life, different from the ones generally used to indict the authoritarian tendencies of the former Bush regime (for instance, the network of CIA-sponsored secret prisons, the undemocratic workings of an imperial presidency, the extralegal operations of power, the emergence of a security state in which every citizen is viewed as a potential terrorist, and the attitude that war is the only viable index of public policy, shared values, and political legitimacy). While the importance of recognizing and understanding such dangerous trends cannot be underestimated, there are other, less visible registers of democratic decline, consigned to the margins of the dominant media, that also signal the pervasive, predatory mode of politics, rationality, and domination that now characterizes everyday life in America and that needs to be addressed under the more progressive Obama administration. Jemisin Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. I critique private space appropriation through imaginative world-building, a method that uses fantasy to reorient ourselves away from the status quo and reconsider the political. MUSIC PLAYING NARRATOR: You've already stepped away from our world a little bit, so don't be hesitant about really striding away. Get into world building and have fun with it. Go forth and create something new. If you're writing science fiction and fantasy, world building is kind of essential. It's one of the pieces that make science fiction and fantasy different from other genre fiction. So it's-- in a lot of cases, you're going to be writing things that are set on Earth, which we call the first world, but sometimes you're going to be writing things at one removed from Earth, i.e. secondary world material. And you want your world to feel real. You want it to feel lived in. And then if it does feel real and lived in, then people are going to be able to pay attention to characters and plot, which hopefully is what you really want them to pay attention to, and the world will sort of fade into the background. MUSIC PLAYING If you're building a new world, you are able to sort of go into topics and materials that can be a little uncomfortable for readers to engage with when they're set in the real world. We have personal feelings attached to all of the politics of our world, and politics is anything having to do with people. So even if you don't think that you're talking about the politics, if you've got a story that has people in it, you are talking about politics. So if you're trying to tell a story about just an ordinary kid going to school every day, you're going to evoke emotions attached to that because people who have gone to school are going to remember their own school incidents. They're going to remember what it was like to walk to school. They're going to have flashbacks of the time they got beat up by some bully on the way to school. If you're writing a story set in the real world, you may want to use those brush strokes of emotion and deliberately evoke something that your audience is trying to kind of meet you halfway on. But if you're writing something set in another world and you want people to engage just with the ideas or just with the characters in that setting, then you take them away from the real world on purpose. You're doing that as a means of detaching your reader from their own personal experiences to some degree. Now, because you're telling a story about people and because stories about people always evoke some sort of emotion, you're still going to get a little bit of that in there, but not as much. And in a way, it's sort of an imagination cleanser, and that way you can draw people into ideas or allegories for the real world that take them away from their own personal experiences as much. MUSIC PLAYING You need to know all the minutia, and as the artist, that means that you have to understand the day to day. How does a person get up every day? How do they put their clothes on? How do they brush their teeth? How do they go to the bathroom? Part 3: New World Sanchez 1 IT’S UP TO US – world-building lets writers challenge existing structures by restoring agency to marginalized groups. This is the power of world-building. In imaginative literature such as science fiction, authors have the unique opportunity to build new worlds. These worlds are, by definition, fantastical departures from the worlds in which the authors and readers find themselves. However, the departure is not total. These fictional worlds do not exist in isolation, in the cold, dead vacuum of space. They are, rather, satellites orbiting our own world. They derive from their authors’ imaginations, and their authors are part of this concrete world. Therefore, when authors sit down to write a novel, to build a new world, they work with a template, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Every brick in every building and every relationship in every culture is a choice, mediated by the bricks and relationships in the nonfictional world. The author must decide whether to keep elements constant, or to change them. These choices are rarely neutral. World-building means building a world to fit a story, yes, but it also means building a world in relation to a series of historical, political, and legacies. This thesis is an investigation of these forces. My research question is as follows: How can fictive world-building be understood in relation to the real world? A few corollary questions include: What relation do social structures in science fiction bear to existing societies? What does this mean for minority groups, who necessarily find themselves on the periphery of their social structure? Essentially, I am interested in world-building as a cultural process. I believe the relationship is reciprocal: science fiction worlds both draw from and react to reality, and these fictional worlds may in turn influence culture. I explore these questions in a variety of dissimilar science fiction venues: critically acclaimed science fiction, popular romantic science fiction, works written by science fiction fans, and small selections of my own work. Throughout these case studies, I argue that science fiction worlds are liminal spaces, constructed through a series of meaningful social inversions. By placing marginalized groups at the center of fictional worlds and narratives, these works have the potential to challenge the dominant social order. Drawing from poststructuralist and queer theory, I assert that world-building is a form of discourse and can serve a powerful function in the project of world-making. She adds: Sanchez, Julie R. B.A., University of Pennsylvania “Liminality, Marginality, Futurity: Case Studies in Contemporary Science Fiction.” University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons, Spring 2014. https://tinyurl.com/yc2n75cv JP/CH The traditional media establishment exercises (symbolic) power over society. Established and entrenched, the Big Six publishers or film studios have a specific claim to truth. Furthermore, they have the ability to impose a certain structure of reality. The symbolic power of media should be a given. Fictional worlds create and recreate our so-called objective reality; they are both structured and structuring. Furthermore, fictional worlds define what is possible in the real world. Their narratives define possible narratives for consumers’ lives. Intentionally or unintentionally, books, movies, and television impose limits on cognition. They play a powerful part in defining doxa. Regardless of genre, they show what is possible and what is not, and these limitations bleed from fiction into nonfiction. This is particularly dangerous in that the reality represented by media does not match objective reality. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBT people are severely underrepresented. Numerous nonprofit groups conduct research on these disparities, including GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index. According to their findings for 2012, of 101 films released by major studios, only 14 contained LGB characters and none contained transgender characters (GLAAD 2013:6). Essentially, media consistently, systematically under represents non-male, non-white, non-heterosexual people and renders minority groups invisible, or nearly so. This does real, personal damage. As Tumblr user relax-ovision writes, “We stretch our existence over stories,” and when stories systematically exclude and erase, this harms those who find their existence denied (relax-o-vision 2013). This perpetuates frames of sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia; for these underrepresented groups, the absence of representation often results in internalized forms of these prejudices. Fanfiction, I suggest, serves as a way of reversing this discourse and of stretching the doxa imposed by traditional media. In fanfiction, ordinary people have the ability to rewrite what is possible. In rewriting source material with better narratives that defy harmful stereotypes, by giving women and POC more substantial roles, and by writing queer relationships, fanfiction authors redefine their doxa. They create fictional worlds with new possibilities and, in so doing, resist the symbolic power of traditional media. In a 2009 video short about convergence culture, presented in true convergence culture fashion, Henry Jenkins speaks to this transformative power: A world governed by principles of participatory culture has the potential to be much more diverse than a world controlled by a small number of media producers. As average people develop an ability to tell their stories, we’re seeing different perspectives emerge. We’re seeing different groups gain representation. We’re seeing groups challenge the dominant media images that have been constructed for their lives. Jenkins 2009 Where Turner would conclude that this small rebellion against established media is a reparative act, post-structuralism offers the possibility of something more revolutionary. Fanfiction demonstrates the agency of individuals, as well as the polyvalent nature of discourse. Fanfiction is a way of reversing discourse, of claiming or reclaiming media, of creating a more equitable mediascape. Fiction is itself an act of power by groups that might traditionally be considered powerless. Far from repairing social solidarity, a poststructuralist account presents fanfiction as an act of resistance, defiance, and power. Fandom is by no means a utopian idyll. Saathi1013 points out that fandom often replicates dominant cultural narratives. A recent blog post on Lady Geek Girl and Friends observed that, while fanfiction has certainly increased visibility for gay men, it hasn’t done the same for queer women. Only 3.5 of fanfiction on AO3 is femslash, or fiction that depicts romantic relationships between women (porluciernagas 2014). Fandom is not immune to sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. The power—though also the danger—of fandom is that fans can carve out their own spaces. Fans search out corners of fandom that share their interests and stay away from those that don’t. The danger is self-isolation and reification, but of all the dangers discussed here, this one is minor. Stereotypical fantasy series like, say, The Lord of the Rings, usually present a virtuous status quo threatened by a dark and eventually defeated outsider. But Jemisin’s stories almost always involve a flawed order, and the efforts (also flawed) to overthrow it. That’s certainly the case in The Fifth Season, where one character uses his magic to literally tear the earth apart rather than face enslavement again. “The goal is survival,” Jemisin writes in the novel, “and sometimes survival requires change.” “As a black woman,” Jemisin tells me, “I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful, the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change. With epic fantasy there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative, in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack.” She adds: “I think our society right now is enduring change in a painful and bloody way that is not necessarily a war.” She points to the incident at the McKinney pool in Texas, where police officers manhandled and arrested black teens at a white swimming pool. The white woman who started the incident by yelling racist slurs was quickly identified on Twitter, and lost her job as a teacher. There’s danger in using Twitter to shame people, Jemisin said, “especially for women. You end up with threats and harassment and so forth.” But in a racist society, she believes, there are few other avenues for holding the woman accountable for traumatising and threatening the lives of black youth. “I see a revolution in that,” Jemisin added. “I see unorthodox change and I see it being effective. And that gives me additional material to possibly write with.” Jemisin’s work itself is part of a slow but definite change in sci-fi and fantasy. She first got involved in fandom and writing through online forums. “I remember a few times going into bastions of the genre and just fleeing in horror,” she said. “For a while you would go into the Asimov forum and see people openly speculating about the humanity of black people, or women.” Things are better in some ways, as Jemisin’s own successes demonstrate. But the progress has generated resistance. Earlier this year, a number of writers and sci-fi industry insiders began to organise and protest against the fact that nominees for the Hugo awards have become substantially less white and less male. The disgruntled have formed groups, calling themselves the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, and have reached out to Gamergate, the similarly reactionary movement protesting feminist criticism of video games. If a new society were created beyond Earth’s stratosphere, who would populate it? Would those nations with space programs be the only ones with access to travel to the new world? Is access dependent on the ability to pay for a space flight? With the prospects of commercial endeavors, who has jurisdiction in a dispute? If the colonization of new lands on Earth were any indication, colonization beyond Earth could spur a host of issues. I presented in spring 2012, the same time that several private companies, including Virgin Galactic, announced their space tourism ticket sales to the public and a few days shy of the first commercial space flight to the International Space Center. Later, Darity, who is also a sci-fi fan, created the first Race and Space conference to begin in fall 2013 and asked me to join him in launching it. Our initial work in launching the conference came at the same time that former astronaut Mae Jemison, the first black woman to go into space, announced that she’d won a federal grant for the 100 Year Starship project, which is devoted to spurring the necessary technological and social innovations to travel to distant stars. We asked her to be our guest speaker. From creating self-sustaining energy sources to traveling as “DNA slush,” the Starship project would leave no stone unturned in the path beyond our solar system. The scientific advancements likely would change new inventions for Earth as well. But the psychological impact of space travel was just as important as the requisite tech savvy. “It’d be unfortunate if the crew didn’t make it because they couldn’t get along with each other,” Jemison said.1 Analyzing race as a technology morphed into both an imaginative playground for writing for me but also a very practical tool for real-world space-colonization issues that readers connected with. Just as the actions in the present dictate the future, imagining the future can change the present. McCordick THIS IS A HELL OF A LOT MORE USEFUL THAN READING LUDICROUS EXTINCTION SCENARIOS – that’s just more disimagination. The world of high school debate is often portrayed as a refuge of the budding brainiac, an incubator of the 21st century’s next generation of leaders. To some extent it is that. But the more revealing truth is that the debating community for years has been afflicted with an ideological and practical struggle over the nature of debate. And that struggle does not exist in a vacuum of cafeterias and lecture halls. It has powerful implications for the current state of U.S. politics and for the pursuit of social justice. Looking back, it seems as if the course of my high school debating career mirrored a deeper erosion in the quality of debate in our wider society. Thanks to a media landscape poisoned by partisan loyalties, the dissemination of “fake news” and the ideological echo chambers created by social media, the country is in the throes of a deep crisis. We don’t know who we are anymore. When I asked myself whether my extracurricular was a force against this decline, or an accessory to it, far too often I settled on the latter. The conventions of high school debate were enabling, at times even creating, our divisive culture. To understand how high school debate went awry, you would have to go all the way back to its origins. The first debate format practiced widely in high schools, beginning in the 1970s, was called Policy Debate. The format, which is still around today, consists of two teams of two debaters each. The affirmative team proposes a policy “plan” based on a resolution—for example, “The United States federal government should significantly reform its criminal justice system.” The negative team responds to that plan. Unlike more recent formats, where the topics change month-to-month, policy topics run for an entire year and require extraordinary dedication to research and preparation. As Policy Debate grew in popularity, the more Machiavellian debaters attempted to gain an edge by overwhelming their opponents with as many arguments and as much supporting evidence as possible. This was because if a team “dropped” an argument by its opponent—if it did not respond to the other side’s claim—that argument was conceded as “true,” no matter how inane it was. Chief among the strategies exploiting this rule was “spreading” (a combination of “speed” and “reading”), where debaters would rattle off arguments at a blistering pace. Their speeches often exceeded 300 words per minute. (A conversational pace is about 60 per minute.) Debaters started formulating outlandish arguments. The more apocalyptic the outcome the better, with little care for the argument’s probability or real-world application. “A new retirement program will trigger a nuclear war.” “Prison overcrowding would cause the destruction of the ozone layer.” High school debate had come to this. If you were to peek into a room in the middle of a policy round, you would likely be treated to a flurry of limbs and spittle, as a teenager expelled arguments from his mouth with such speed and force that he would sometimes appear to lose control of his fine motor functions. When an executive of Phillips Petroleum, then the primary sponsor of the National Forensics League, observed a debate at the 1979 national championship, he found it utterly incomprehensible. The executive aired his concerns to the league’s executive council, resulting in an entirely new debate category called the Lincoln-Douglas debate. This format, with its express reference to the famous debates over slavery between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, was designed to promote debates about values and prioritize rhetorical persuasion. In contrast to Policy Debate’s wonkish topics, L.D. featured more timeless resolutions. “It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people.” Or “When in conflict, idealism ought to be valued above pragmatism.” The new format earned the disdain of Policy Debate’s more snobbish competitors, who joked that its initials stood for “learning disabled.” But for students disillusioned with P.D.’s descent into nonsensical, mile-a-minute argumentation, it was a godsend. At least for a while. Soon L.D. suffered the same fate as its precursor. The speed of argumentation increased, as did the amount of evidence required to be competitive at the national level. As with Policy Debate, the arguments became increasingly unmoored from reality. Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given. As L.D. descended further and further into absurdity, Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN, came along and attempted to turn the ship again. Like the Philips executive several decades earlier, he pushed the National Forensic League in 2002 to establish a new debate format that would be plainspoken and jargon-free. The resulting format, which immediately drew comparisons to CNN’s “Crossfire,” was called Public Forum. Its title was an expression of Mr. Turner’s hope that any reasonably informed member of the public could walk into a Public Forum round and be able to pick a winner. A decade and a half after its inception, P.F. is still by far the most intelligible category in debate. However, in recent years its speed has increased markedly, as have the mountains of evidence. The emphasis on logic and critical thinking has waned. High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. It has been turned into something that can easily be scored. This eliminates the complexity and intricacy of real discourse about real issues. If debate is a game, then the execution of a “spread” is like a well-timed blitz in football. Convincing a judge that your opponents’ arguments would cause human extinction is equivalent to a successful Hail Mary pass. Dozens of summer debate camps have cropped up across the country, offering students the opportunity to go “from novice to nationals,” as one brochure put it. Companies now offer bundles of prepackaged evidence, or “briefs,” to debaters willing to pay to get the upper hand. Instead of producing free, rigorous thinkers committed to the pursuit of truth, debate clubs now promote a very specific technical mastery of skills that do not easily translate to the demands of real life. The problems plaguing high school debate are mirrored in our public sphere. Political discourse is often little more than a game. Its goal is to score political points with witty rejoinders and scathing takedowns. The purpose of “adult debate,” as with debate for 16-year-olds, is to bludgeon your opponent into submission instead of engaging in open-minded dialogue. Over time I began to realize that high school debate was my firsthand education in the perversion and abuse of language. I learned how language could be used to conceal, to muddle. This was not limited to the debate community. The writer (and former debate wunderkind) Ben Lerner once wrote, “Americans are always getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives.” Think of the rapid-fire medical warnings at the end of prescription drug commercials. Consider the various types of fine print we are exposed to every day from financial institutions and healthcare companies, not to mention Apple’s “Terms and Conditions.” I remember that even when high school debates slowed down enough to seem comprehensible, the avalanche of evidence (much of it of dubious value) and specialized jargon often confused more than it revealed. It became like the kind of language currently poisoning our public sphere. I learned immensely important skills from my four years of debate. I have met many brilliant, incredibly well-read students from across the country from schools dedicated to treating debate the right way. But these are exceptions, not the rule. The norms that currently guide debate elevate form over content, and victory over truth. Debate programs are perfectly situated to produce students who want to seek the truth, who will resist the decay of quality public speech. As currently practiced, however, the clearest evidence of a high school debate career is often just a collection of plastic trophies, slowly gathering dust. Individuals like themselves, they insist, must "research to find out the truth about issues suppressed by the media, what you don't learn in school." Or as a Nazi from Georgia put it, you must "teach your children the truth about things you won't read about in history books or see in the news." Apocalyptic, millennial, and conspiratorial thought reflects a sense of personal and group powerlessness, victimization and imminent peril that resonates with the experiences of many women. Part of what makes such thinking so compelling to individuals is how it taps into a sense of both personal and political vulnerability. Most individuals in this society experience threatening situations, but white supremacist organizations teach people to understand their personal situations in generalized, racialized terms. Thus confrontations with members of other races or religions become understood as specific incidents that confirm the existence of a larger racial/religious struggle in which each individual -- consciously or not -- is involved. This process of moving from specific incidents to general principles is seen in the words of an Aryan separatist who commented that she "could have race mixed when I was younger and lots of black men wanted to date me but after seeing what happened to my girlfriends I knew that it was wrong to date outside of my race." For some adherents to organized racism, the process of generalizing from individual experience to race relations is much more complex. Most racists come to understand negative experiences with members of minority groups in general, racialized terms. But some become more deeply involved with conspiratorial logic and learn to see nearly all personal experiences through a racial, conspiratorial lens. One example of such all-encompassing conspiratorial belief is the conclusion that race, religion and ethnicity can only be known through actions. People who are "on your side" therefore are necessarily white, Aryan or Christian -- regardless of their appearance. Conversely, those who wrong you must be non-white, non-Aryan or Jewish. Such a logic is evident in a number of interviews where respondents sought to distinguish someone's true racial identity from their superficial racial markings. When a Southern neo-Nazi described her best friend, an African American man, for instance, she explained that, as a confidante, he was "really white." Chernus PSYCHIC NUMBING – reading extinction scenarios on both sides on literally every topic DESENSITIZES US TO ACTUAL VIOLENCE and PREVENTS IMAGINATIVE SOLUTIONS. Why does American culture use the A-word so promiscuously? Perhaps we've been living so long under a cloud of doom that every danger now readily takes on the same lethal hue. Psychiatrist Robert Lifton predicted such a state years ago when he suggested that the nuclear age had put us all in the grips of what he called “psychic numbing” or “death in life.” We can no longer assume that we'll die Vonnegut’s plain old death and be remembered as part of an endless chain of life. Lifton's research showed that the link between death and life had become, as he put it, a "broken connection." As a result, he speculated, our minds stop trying to find the vitalizing images necessary for any healthy life. Every effort to form new mental images only conjures up more fear that the chain of life itself is coming to a dead end. Ultimately, we are left with nothing but "apathy, withdrawal, depression, despair." If that's the deepest psychic lens through which we see the world, however unconsciously, it's easy to understand why anything and everything can look like more evidence that The End is at hand. No wonder we have a generation of American youth and young adults who take a world filled with apocalyptic images for granted. Think of it as, in some grim way, a testament to human resiliency. They are learning how to live with the only reality they've ever known (and with all the irony we’re capable of, others are learning how to sell them cultural products based on that reality). Naturally, they assume it's the only reality possible. It's no surprise that "The Walking Dead," a zombie apocalypse series, is their favorite TV show, since it reveals (and revels in?) what one TV critic called the "secret life of the post-apocalyptic American teenager." Perhaps the only thing that should genuinely surprise us is how many of those young people still manage to break through psychic numbing in search of some way to make a difference in the world. Yet even in the political process for change, apocalypses are everywhere. Regardless of the issue, the message is typically some version of "Stop this catastrophe now or we're doomed!" (An example: Stop the Keystone XL pipeline or it’s “game over”!) A better future is often implied between the lines, but seldom gets much attention because it’s ever harder to imagine such a future, no less believe in it. No matter how righteous the cause, however, such a single-minded focus on danger and doom subtly reinforces the message of our era of apocalypses everywhere: abandon all hope, ye who live here and now. | 4/24/22 |
ND- Prison Workers 1ACTournament: Scarsdale | Round: Octas | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Panel ROJ and Giroux THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IS CORRUPTING EDUCATION – it permits oppression for financial gain and DRIVES acceptance of the squo. We now live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished. (1) The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor people of color and any vestige of the social contract. Free-market policies, values and practices – with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections and the deregulation of economic activity – now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, noncommodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly commercialized – or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. For example, higher education is defined more and more as simply another core element of corporate power and culture, viewed mostly as a waste of taxpayers’ money, and denied its value as a democratic public sphere and guardian of public values. What has become clear is that the attack on the social state, workers and unions is now being matched by a full-fledged assault on higher education. Such attacks are not happening just in the United States but in many other parts of the globe where casino capitalism is waging a savage battle to eliminate all of those public spheres that might offer a glimmer of opposition to and protection from market-driven policies, institutions, ideology and values. We live at a time when it is more crucial than ever to believe that the university is both a public trust and social good. At best, it is a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility and the struggle for justice. In addition, higher education should be at the “heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times.” (2) Underlying this vision of the university are some serious questions about its relationship to the larger society. For instance, how might the university’s responsibility be understood with respect to safeguarding the interests of young people at a time of violence and war, the rise of a rampant anti-intellectualism, a devastating gap in income and wealth, the rise of the surveillance state, and the threat of ecological and nuclear devastation? What might it mean to define the university as a pedagogical space that disrupts, disturbs, inspires and energizes young people to be individual and social agents rather than as an institution that redefines itself in terms of market values and reacts mostly to market fluctuations? It is in the spirit of such considerations that I first want to address those larger economic, social and cultural interests produced largely by the growing inequalities in wealth, income and power that threaten the notion of higher education as a democratic public good. As higher education’s role as a center of critical thought and civic engagement is devalued, society is being transformed into a “spectacular space of consumption” and financial looting. One consequence is an ongoing flight from mutual obligations and social responsibilities and a loss of faith in politics itself. This loss of faith in the power of politics, public dialogue and dissent is not unrelated to the diminished belief in higher education as central to producing critically engaged, civically literate and socially responsible citizens. At stake here are not only the meaning and purpose of higher education, but also civil society, politics and the fate of democracy itself. And yet, under the banner of right-wing reforms, the only questions being asked about knowledge production, the purpose of education, the nature of politics and the future are determined largely by market forces. A compulsory deferral of abolitionist pedagogical possibilities composes the largely unaddressed precedent of teaching in the current historical period. It is this deferral—generally unacknowledged and largely presumed—that both undermines the emergence of an abolitionist pedagogical praxis and illuminates abolitionism’s necessity as a dynamic practice of social transformation, over and against liberal and progressive appropriations of “critical/radical pedagogy.” Contrary to the thinly disguised ideological Alinskyism that contemporary liberal, progressive, critical, and “radical” teaching generally and tacitly assumes in relation to the prison regime, what is usually required, and what usually works as a strategy for teaching against the carceral common sense, is a pedagogical approach that asks the unaskable, posits the necessity of the impossible, and embraces the creative danger inherent in liberationist futures. About a decade of teaching a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at one of the most demographically diverse research universities in the United States (the University End Page 12 of California, Riverside) has allowed me the opportunity to experiment with the curricular content, assignment form, pedagogical mode, and conceptual organization of coursework that directly or tangentially addresses the formation of the U.S. prison regime and prison industrial complex. Students are consistently (and often unanimously) eager to locate their studies within an abolitionist genealogy—often understanding their work as potentially connected to a living history of radical social movements and epistemological-political revolt—and tend to embrace the high academic demands and rigor of these courses with far less resistance and ambivalence than in many of my other Ethnic Studies courses. There are some immediate analytical and scholarly tools that form a basic pedagogical apparatus for productively exploding the generalized common sense that creates and surrounds the U.S. prison regime. In fact, it is crucial for teachers and students to collectively understand that it is precisely the circulation and concrete enactment of this common sense that makes it central to the prison regime, not simply an ideological “supplement” of it. Put differently, many students and teachers have a tendency to presume that the cultural symbols and popular discourses that signify and give common sense meaning to prisons and policing are external to the prison regime, as if these symbols and discourses (produced through mass media, state spokespersons and elected officials, right-wing think tanks, video games, television crime dramas, etc.) simply amount to “bad” or “deceptive” propaganda that conspiratorially hide some essential “truth” about prisons that can be uncovered. This is a seductive and self-explanatory, but far too simplistic, way of understanding how the prison regime thrives. What we require, instead, is a sustained analytical discussion that considers how multiple layers of knowledge—including common sense and its different cultural forms—are constantly producing a “lived truth” of policing and prisons that has nothing at all to do with an essential, objective truth. Rather, this fabricated, lived truth forms the template of everyday life through which we come to believe that we more or less understand and “know” the prison and policing apparatus, and which dynamically produces our consent and/or surrender to its epochal oppressive violence. As a pedagogical tool, this framework compels students and teachers to examine how deeply engaged they are in the violent common sense of the prison and the racist state. Who is left for dead in the common discourse of crime, “innocence,” and “guilt”? How has the mundane institutionalized violence of the racist state become so normalized as to be generally beyond comment? What has made the prison and policing apparatus in its current form appear to be so permanent, necessary, and immovable within the common sense of social change and historical transformation? In this sense, teachers and students can attempt to concretely understand how they are a dynamic part of the prison regime’s production and reproduction—and thus how they might also be part of its abolition through the work of building and teaching a radical and liberatory common sense (this is political work that anyone can do, ideally as part of a community of social movement). Additionally, the abolitionist teacher can prioritize a rigorous—and vigorous—critique of the endemic complicities of liberal/progressive reformism to the End Page 13 transformation, expansion, and ultimate reproduction of racist state violence and (proto)genocide; this entails a radical critique of everything from the sociopolitical legacies of “civil rights” and the oppressive capacities of “human rights” to the racist state’s direct assimilation of 1970s-era “prison reform” agendas into the blueprints for massive prison expansion discussed above.17 The abolitionist teacher must be willing to occupy the difficult and often uncomfortable position of political leadership in the classroom. To some, this reads as a direct violation of Freirian conceptions of critical pedagogy, but I would argue that it is really an elaboration and amplification of the revolutionary spirit at the heart of Freire’s entire lifework. That is, how can a teacher expect her/his students to undertake the courageous and difficult work of inhabiting an abolitionist positionality—even if only as an “academic” exercise—unless the teacher herself/himself embodies, performs, and oozes that very same political desire? In fact, it often seems that doing the latter is enough to compel many students (at least momentarily) to become intimate and familiar with the allegedly impossible. Finally, the horizon of the possible is only constrained by one’s pedagogical willingness to locate a particular political struggle (here, prison abolition) within the long and living history of liberation movements. In this context, “prison abolition” can be understood as one important strain within a continuously unfurling fabric of liberationist political horizons, in which the imagination of the possible and the practical is shaped but not limited by the specific material and institutional conditions within which one lives. It is useful to continually ask: on whose shoulders does one sit, when undertaking the audacious identifications and political practices endemic to an abolitionist pedagogy? There is something profoundly indelible and emboldening in realizing that one’s “own” political struggle is deeply connected to a vibrant, robust, creative, and beautiful legacy of collective imagination and creative social labor (and of course, there are crucial ways of comprehending historical liberation struggles in all their forms, from guerilla warfare to dance). While I do not expect to arrive at a wholly satisfactory pedagogical endpoint anytime soon, and am therefore hesitant to offer prescriptive examples of “how to teach” within an abolitionist framework, I also believe that rigorous experimentation and creative pedagogical radicalism is the very soul of this praxis. There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that finally fulfills the abolitionist social vision, there is only a political desire that understands the immediacy of struggling for human liberation from precisely those forms of systemic violence and institutionalized dehumanization that are most culturally and politically sanctioned, valorized, and taken for granted within one’s own pedagogical moment. To refuse End Page 14 or resist this desire is to be unaccountable to the historical truth of our moment, in which the structural logic and physiological technologies of social liquidation (removal from or effective neutralization within civil society) have merged with history’s greatest experiment in punitive human captivity, a linkage that increasingly lays bare racism’s logical outcome in genocide.18 Abolitionist Position and Praxis Given the historical context I have briefly outlined, and the practical-theoretical need for situating an abolitionist praxis within a longer tradition of freedom struggle, I contend that there can be no liberatory teaching act, nor can there be an adequately critical pedagogical practice, that does not also attempt to become an abolitionist one. Provisionally, I am conceptualizing abolition as a praxis of liberation that is creative and experimental rather than formulaic and rigidly programmatic. Abolition is a “radical” political position, as well as a perpetually creative and experimental pedagogy, because formulaic approaches cannot adequately apprehend the biopolitics, dynamic statecraft, and internalized violence of genocidal and proto-genocidal systems of human domination. As a productive and creative praxis, this conception of abolition posits the material possibility and historical necessity of a social capacity for human freedom based on a cultural-economic infrastructure that supports the transformation of oppressive relations that are the legacy of genocidal conquest, settler colonialism, racial slavery/capitalism,19 compulsory hetero-patriarchies, and global white supremacy. In this sense, abolitionist praxis does not singularly concern itself with the “abolition of the prison industrial complex,” although it fundamentally and strategically prioritizes the prison as a central site for catalyzing broader, radical social transformations. In significant part, this suggests envisioning and ultimately constructing “a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscape of our society.”20 In locating abolitionist praxis within a longer political genealogy that anticipates the task of remaking the world under transformed material circumstances, this position refracts the most radical and revolutionary dimensions of a historical Black freedom struggle that positioned the abolition of “slavery” as the condition of possibility for Black—hence “human”—freedom. To situate contemporary abolitionism as such is also to recall the U.S. racist state’s (and its liberal allies’) displacement and effective political criminalization of Black radical abolitionism through the 13th Amendment’s 1865 recodification of the slave relation through the juridical reinvention of a racial-carceral relation: Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.21 emphasis added Given the institutional elaborations of racial criminalization, policing, and massive imprisonment that have prevailed on the 13th Amendment’s essential authorization to replace a regime of racist chattel slavery with racist carceral state violence, it is incumbent on the radical teacher to assess the density of her/his entanglement in this historically layered condition of End Page 15 violence, immobilization, and capture. Prior to the work of formulating an effective curriculum and teaching strategy for critically engaging the prison industrial complex, in other words, is the even more difficult work of examining the assumptive limitations of any “radical pedagogy” that does not attempt to displace an epistemological and cultural common sense in which the relative order and peace of the classroom is perpetually reproduced by the systemic disorder and deep violence of the prison regime. In relation to the radical challenging of common sense discussed above, another critical analytical tool for building an abolitionist pedagogy entails the rigorous, scholarly dismantling of the “presentist” and deeply ahistorical understanding of policing and prisons. Students (and many teachers) frequently enter such dialogues with an utterly mystified conception of the policing and prison apparatus, and do not generally understand that 1) these apparatuses in their current form are very recent creations, and have not been around “forever”; and 2) the rise of these institutional forms of criminalization, domestic war, and mass-scale imprisonment forms one link in a historical chain of genocidal and proto-genocidal mobilizations of the racist state that regularly take place as part of the deadly global process of U.S. nation-building. In other words, not only is the prison regime a very recent invention of the state (and therefore is neither a “permanent” nor indestructible institutional assemblage), but it is institutionally and historically inseparable from the precedent and contemporaneous structures of large-scale racist state violence. Asserting the above as part of the core analytical framework of the pedagogical structure can greatly enable a discussion of abolitionist possibility that thinks of the critical dialogue as a necessary continuation of long historical struggles against land conquest, slavery, racial colonialism, and imperialist war. This also means that our discussions take place within a longer temporal community with those liberation struggles, such that we are neither “crazy” nor “isolated.” I have seen students and teachers speak radical truth to power under difficult and vulnerable circumstances based on this understanding that they are part of a historical record. I have had little trouble “convincing” most students—across distinctions of race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and geography—of the gravity and emergency of our historical moment. It is the analytical, political, and practical move toward an abolitionist positionality that is (perhaps predictably) far more challenging. This is in part due to the fraudulent and stubborn default position of centrist-to-progressive liberalism/reformism (including assertions of “civil” and “human” rights) as the only feasible or legible response to reactionary, violent, racist forms of state power. Perhaps more troublesome, however, is that this resistance to engaging with abolitionist praxis seems to also derive from a deep and broad epistemological and cultural disciplining of the political imagination that makes liberationist dreams unspeakable. This disciplining is most overtly produced through hegemonic state and cultural apparatuses and their representatives (including elected officials, popular political pundits and public intellectuals, schools, family units, religious institutions, etc.), but is also compounded through the pragmatic imperatives of many liberal and progressive nonprofit organizations and social movements that reproduce the political limitations of the End Page 16 nonprofit industrial complex. 22 In this context, the liberationist historical identifications hailed by an abolitionist social imagination also require that such repression of political-intellectual imagination be fought, demystified, and displaced. Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than an abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and survive and thrive in a time defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize populations through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to better understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily pedagogical, within and against the “system” in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments, abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating and not simply opposing) public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the present moment clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social transformations. The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of massive human misery. It is the production of bodily and psychic disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities. The prison industrial complex is, in its logic of organization and its production of common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison regime is inseparable from—that is, present in—the schooling regime in which teachers are entangled. Prison is not simply a place to which one is displaced and where one’s physiological being is disarticulated, at the rule and whim of the state and its designated representatives (police, parole officers, school teachers). The prison regime is the assumptive premise of classroom teaching generally. While many of us must live in labored denial of this fact in order to teach as we must about “American democracy,” “freedom,” and “(civil) rights,” there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come clean: the vast majority of what occurs in U.S. classrooms—from preschool to graduate school—cannot accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison regime as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component of civil society/school, and a material presence in our everyday teaching acts. As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide management, in which our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing, redeeming, justifying, lamenting, and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic violence of the global-historical U.S. nation building project. As “radical” teachers, we are politically hailed to betray genocide management in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival of those populations rendered most immediately vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this system, and the long-term survival of most of the planet’s human population (particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization, conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical audacity Part 2: Behind the Wall Lopez EXPLOITATION IS THE SQUO – prisoners are currently being exploited for labor, sometimes working for nothing. If there’s one issue inmate protesters are united on, it’s prison labor. In many states, prisoners are forced to work for cents an hour or even for free. This is allowed after the abolishment of slavery through the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, which banned slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Hundreds of thousands of inmates across the US have jobs — not just firefighting, but also more typical jobs like kitchen work, cleaning, and GED tutoring. Sometimes the jobs will take inmates outside of prison, although more frequently they merely mimic real-world jobs or involve menial chores that need to be done around the prison. The average pay in state prisons is 20 cents an hour, according to the Marshall Project. During the 2016 prison strikes, protesters characterized the practice as modern slavery. And with black people disproportionately likely to be incarcerated, there are racial disparities in this often forced, low-paid labor. The 2018 protesters are taking a similar approach. “Prison slavery exists,” Sawari argued. “The 13th Amendment didn’t abolish slavery. It wrote slavery into the Constitution. There’s a general knowledge that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but if you read it, there’s an exception clause in the abolishing of it. That’s really contradictory — that something would be abolished and there would be an exception to that.” She pointed to companies that have taken advantage of prison labor in the past, including Victoria’s Secret and Starbucks — arguing they need to be called out for what amounts to, in some inmates’ view, exploitation. Prison officials and other advocates argue, however, that prison labor can help inmates gain much-needed real-world working experience. Some research has backed this up: A study of federal prisoners found inmates who took part in UNICOR, the federal prison work program, were 24 percent less likely to reoffend and 14 percent more likely to be employed a year after their release. And a study of a Florida program found significant increases in employment after release, but no changes in inmates’ likelihood to reoffend. These studies aren’t definitive proof, because they have serious selection bias issues. It’s difficult to know whether the inmates participating in prison labor programs are those who are already less likely to reoffend and more likely to get and keep a job after prison — since they’re able and, in some cases, volunteering to work while they’re incarcerated. Some studies try to control for this, but it can never be fully ruled out. There’s also a moral argument against prison labor as it’s done today: Even if prison work helps some inmates, that doesn’t justify paying prisoners pennies or nothing at all. Under this view, if the prison work programs are beneficial, spending on them should be increased so everyone can participate and get more pay for their work. Of course, these are also people in prison — a place they are in as punishment for their crimes. So why do they deserve to be paid a higher wage? Sawari countered that these inmates are still often the primary breadwinners for their families and expected to meet some financial obligations even before their release. “Prisoners do like having the opportunity to earn, because they do have to support themselves financially in a lot of ways,” Sawari said. “Prisoners have to provide for their health care, their dental care. They have to buy food if they want to eat outside the three times a day most prisons serve. … They have to buy clothes like jackets and boots, hygiene products, cosmetics, books, study materials, paper, tape, scissors. Any little thing they need, they have to buy that. So they want to be able to.” Prison officials say they couldn’t afford to pay inmates more. They point out that there are many extra costs tied to prison labor — such as the chance of lockdowns, security needs, and the costs of inmates’ housing, food, and health care. As California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Jeffrey Callison told me, “The per capita cost of one inmate in our prison system now exceeds $80,000.” Those are expenses employers in the free world don’t typically have to carry. But for many inmates, the poor pay still feels unfair. So they’re protesting for three weeks. Some employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison. During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry. Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees. “The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays. Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage. That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry. In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines. About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25 of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5 goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant. Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration. “Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.” Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem. Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.” Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work. In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers. “Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.” Although none of the strikers’ ten demands have yet been met, the 2018 nationwide prison strike was still a remarkable event in its scope and coordination, as well as its ability to generate public support and attention. An estimated 150 different organizations endorsed the strike; citizens held numerous demonstrations outside of prisons in solidarity; and a range of national media publications provided detailed coverage of the protest’s motivations, objectives, tactics, and status as potentially the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” 7. Despite the 2018 prison strike’s apparent gravity, it is difficult to fully contextualize its significance because surprisingly little attention has been paid to prison strikes previously. For instance, just two years prior, in 2016, a similar nationwide prison strike was described as “the largest prison strike . . . you probably haven’t heard about.” 8. In light of this reality, this Note peers behind prison walls to improve our understanding of prison strikes — the end goal being to open the door to a broader discussion of why and how these strikes should receive legal protection. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. In particular, this Part provides an abbreviated overview of strikes across four key periods of prison development in the United States: (1) the inception of the American prison during the early American republic, (2) the creation of modern legal punishment and penitentiaries between the antebellum period and Reconstruction, (3) the explosion of prison systems and prison labor between Reconstruction and World War II, and finally (4) the prisoners’ rights and reform movements emerging between the end of World War II and our present-day mass incarceration system. This overview suggests that as the carceral state has expanded and evolved, so too have prison strikes — thus placing actions like the latest 2018 strike in a long tradition of prisoners organizing to express deeply held grievances. Further, examining the history of prison strikes reveals that strikes are often the only way for the incarcerated to act on those grievances — and that while strikes have rarely brought about immediate changes, they have helped initiate longer-term prison reforms and have periodically been successful in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed plight of those behind bars. HLR 2 The aff’s inherent – there is no recourse for when prisoners want to strike now. As a threshold matter, state and federal statutory law provides no recourse for protecting prison strikes. Incarcerated individuals are not included as protected “employees” in the text of federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards and the National Labor Relations Act, and courts have refused to extend the protections that these statutes offer to those confined within prison walls. Further, this Note is aware of no state labor laws, or for that matter any state constitutional provisions, that have been interpreted to allow prisoners to strike. Not only are prison strikes not protected by statutory law — they also are often explicitly prohibited. State statutes and prison regulations pose the most immediate barrier to prison strike activity, as states across the union appear to categorically bar prison strikes and other forms of inmate collective organizing. For instance, Alaska’s administrative code lists “participation in an organized work stoppage” and “encouraging others to engage in a food strike” as “high-moderate infractions.” Some other states have adopted similar statutory or administrative provisions. For a related analysis of state statutes and prison regulations governing prison “protest speech,” see Andrea C. Armstrong, Racial Origins of Doctrines Limiting Prisoner Protest Speech,. The same is true at the federal level, as the Bureau of Prisons has made “eengaging in or encouraging a group demonstration” and “encouraging others to refuse to work, or to participate in a work stoppage” prohibited acts. Further research is certainly necessary to develop a fuller, more nuanced treatment of the various state and federal statutory schemes that impact prison strikes. Further research could reveal differences across states in the severity of punishment for prison strike activity, as well as the scope of permissible collective action by prisoners. This could, in turn, reveal possible avenues for potentially protecting prisoners’ ability to strike. See, e.g., In re Gomez, 201 Cal. Rptr. 3d 124 (Ct. App. 2016) (holding that an inmate participating in a broader hunger strike and work stoppage across California prisons did not violate a California regulation that requires inmates to “refrain from behavior that might lead to violence or disorder, or otherwise endangers the facility, outside community or other person,” . As the court held in that case, none of the accusations against the inmate regarding striking “suggested prison operations were thrown into disorder.” Id. at 137. But even this brief overview drives home a clear bottom line: that state and federal laws, in their current forms, likely offer no viable protection for prison strikes and indeed often prohibit them outright. Thus, I affirm: The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader jurisprudence around hunger strikes, and this area of the law’s focus on the body, may present yet another avenue to consider. And more fundamentally, reconsidering incarceration — including the nature of penal punishment, the constitutional status of prisoners, the judiciary’s role in our carceral system, and the ability of social science and social movements to inform the law — may be needed to protect prison strikes and bring about the reforms that strikes have advocated for. There is a difficult tension in our jurisprudence on prisoners. On the one hand, prisoners are found to enjoy some constitutional rights. On the other hand, prisoners’ rights are often curtailed and must give way to the regulations that prison officials employ to maintain security and order in our correctional system. Allowing prisoners to peacefully strike allows our criminal justice system to navigate this tension, preserving the goals of prison officials while allowing prisoners to surface critical problems in prison conditions and our criminal justice system as a whole. The strikes also represent an important end unto themselves: they are an important statement of prisoners’ humanity, dignity, and entitlement to a life beyond “modern slavery.” Kaur Prison strikes create media attention that sheds light on the injustices of the prisoner industrial complex. In the unbearable heat of Rajasthan, some undertrial male prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail, locked up in small suffocating cells for up to 23 hours without ventilation or fans, resolved to take action. The prisoners started a hunger strike demanding installation of boxes where prisoners could put their complaints, and regular visits of a judge to look into their complaints (Waqar 2019). Prisoners had intimated about their hunger strike along with the demands in a letter to the prison authorities and the judge presiding over their trials. On the intervening night of 29 and 30 March 2019, some undertrial prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail were dragged and beaten up brutally, leading to fractured limbs and serious injuries. Despite the judge issuing a notice to the jail authorities, prisoners not only suffered physical beatings, but they were also charged under Sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (use of criminal force on public servant in execution of his duties) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for causing injury to a prison official’s finger, and inflicting self-harm (Hindu 2019). The most astonishing aspect of this turn of events is that the demands of the prisoners for which they started the hunger strike are the mechanisms that prison authorities should on their own be adopting as per the mandatory directions given by the Supreme Court in several cases including Sunil Batra (II) v Delhi Administration and Madhukar B Jambhale v State of Maharashtra. On 23 and 24 June, 2017 women prisoners of Byculla Jail in Mumbai rebelled to highlight torture and murder of their co-prisoner Manjula Shetye by prison staff. If it wasn’t for their strike, Manjula’s case would never have seen the light of the day. Their strike brought so much attention to Manjula’s murder in custody that not only the accused prison staff were arrested and are currently being tried, but ministers and parliamentarians have visted the prisoners. However, an first information report against the 200 women prisoners was filed for allegedly rioting, making unlawful assembly (Dalvi, 2018). 3. Petition for Redress. — Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government. 169. While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,” 170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.” 171. Id. at 145. Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons. 172. Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed; 173. inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards, 174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities, 175. are given substandard medical care, 176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances; 177. most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services; 178. and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates, 179. and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims. 180. And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden. 181. As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”; 182. Keller, supra note 172. peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world” 183. As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transformations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies. 185. See supra note 73 and accompanying text. In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions. 186. And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms. B. CONSIDERING ADDITIONAL LEGAL AVENUES FOR PROTECTING PRISON STRIKES The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” HLR 5 And strikes offer an alternative to violence and a means of collective bargaining for inmates. The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. 145. Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy. 146. Although “association” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, the Court has long recognized the right as both implicit in and derived from the First Amendment’s other express guarantees (namely speech and assembly), and as a separate substantive due process right. Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.” 147. This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.” 148. However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process; 149. in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders, 151. Id. at 738–39. with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.” 152. Id. at 729. This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them 153. Id. at 738. — creating hierarchical relationships 154. Id. at 739–40. that breed mistrust 155. Id. at 741–42. and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved. 156. Id. at 741–43. As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress. 157. Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff. 158. And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change” 160. — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates, 161. Note, supra note 148, at 751–52. all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order. 162. The lack of oversight has become dangerous. While we don’t know the numbers of prisoners who are injured at work (OSHA maintains that data on employees only), we do have stories about allegations of substandard care and dangerous working conditions. In one case, a Georgia man who lost his leg after a fall in a prison kitchen won $550,000 from the state after claiming that a prison doctor neglected his injury. Other inmates have lost thumbs and fingers when they were caught in machinery. In Pueblo, Colorado, a female inmate, Kara Fuelling, was almost decapitated while working in a saw mill when a blade tore through her helmet. In California, two inmates conscripted into firefighting detail through the state Department of Corrections lost their lives. In Georgia, just this past May, a prisoner on work detail was killed by a distracted driver passing the highway work site. Although it could be argued that these injuries and deaths can happen anywhere, the difference is that workplaces outside of prison have some safety oversight and with it, a higher standard of care. If prisons had to comply with OSHA standards, these injuries and deaths may have been prevented. Inmate injuries are worthy of even more preventive oversight when you consider that medical care can be substandard in many correctional facilities. The Georgia inmate who lost his leg initially sustained only a dime-sized cut above his ankle, but evidence in the lawsuit indicated that a lack of care worsened his injury to the point that he had to sacrifice a limb. Kara Fuelling, the saw mill worker, wasn’t brought to an emergency room but was rather transported to the prison infirmary. According to Fuelling’s lawsuit, a doctor who examined her was concerned about possible infection because the saw blade was dirty; she went on to develop an antibiotic-resistant MRSA infection. Many of these injuries are caused by equipment that, according to a report in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business and Employment Law, was known to be faulty or defective. Even when inmates are hurt because the correctional facility is negligent, there’s little to no recourse for incarcerated workers when they are injured. This is mostly because occupational statutes in 43 states exclude incarcerated workers from the definition of employees, and thereby don’t allow those workers to file worker compensation claims. This is much more a problem for inmates than it is for the prisons themselves. In all of the litigation over prison work injuries, only a handful of courts have said that dangerous conditions violate the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Because there’s little-to-no liability for the facilities, danger abounds in American prisons. One of the motivating factors for the current strike is the April riot at Lee Correctional Center in South Carolina, where seven prisoners were killed. Initially, prison officials blamed the deaths on gang disputes and the use of contraband cellphones. But as more eyewitness accounts became available, the Lee riot was revealed to have taken place in a “gladiator school” where guards had reportedly abandoned their posts. One inmate said that there were no immediate deaths from the violence within the facility. The people who died were allowed to bleed out, he said, as guards looked on. Strikes like the current one are necessary to change safety conditions in prisons because the usual avenues of remedy – grievance procedures and courts – have been blocked off by an erosion in human rights standards when it comes to people who have been convicted of breaking the law. Many people may be horrified by the way incarcerated people are treated, but disagree with the tactic of a strike where the risk of injury goes up even further as strikers are dragged to solitary confinement and disciplined in other ways. But there is no other way. Courts and administrative remedies have failed to protect imprisoned people. While incarcerated we witnessed many inmates who came to expect injuries, accidents and even death. Such an expectation of punishment seems medieval, but prisoners are taking a stand to show that it is, unfortunately, still a modern phenomenon. | 11/20/21 |
ND- Prison Workers 1AC V2Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AL | Judge: Jacob Lugo Guinier and Torres RACISM IS RAMPANT, AND DEBATE’S A PLACE TO CHALLENGE IT – rounds are practice for real world engagement of political problems. An individual in isolation cannot constitute or define the meaning of a political space. Only when individuals freely join together to resist and transform the forces of conventional power which named them as part of¶ a group in the first place can the possibilities emerge for generating new¶ forms of collective and democratic struggle. Those intermediate spaces defined by this reconceptualization of post-postmodern power offer the¶ opportunity for individuals to share their stories and construct relationships that reinforce a more systemic and critical social understanding. The effort to expand our readings of race and power beyond strictly win/lose outcomes is not explanatory as much as it is motivational. It describes, from the inside out, what it feels like to experience the joy of human solidarity when mobilized to generate new and unexpected outcomes. Thus, political race builds from inside the lived experience of a marginalized community and uses that experience as an imperfect but valuable lens through which to view and possibly enhance an individual’s political status. The lens on that experience can be stretched and even reshaped when human beings join together to engage in diagnosing and organizing through the multi-step process that we imagine. When and if it is¶ acknowledged, groups may move from this vantage point to join with others in free spaces of participatory democracy that resist authority and challenge the status quo. As we illustrate in Chapters 5 and 6, these free spaces are usually outside the formal public sphere of legislative decision-making; they are also¶ not the same as the public sphere of communitarian literature. They are instead intermediate or in-between places in which a marginalized group can share their experiences without interference from the dominant¶ group.6 The interstices are practice fields or training sessions for an eventual engagement with various hierarchical sources of power. They are laboratories¶ as well as launching pads. As more and more teachers, administrators, schools and organizations are questioning their practices and looking at the racist history of their institutions, many are finally asking, “How we can listen to and support Black students, teachers and communities who have been systemically silenced for too long?” This question is essential, and examining anti-Blackness in our practice is something we all must be looking at. Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is. Anti-racist work means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives—from education to housing to climate change—and then actively doing work to tear down those beliefs and structures. Those beliefs and structures don’t just exist in primarily white/and or privileged institutions—they thrive there. Schools that house mostly students and teachers who have benefited from white privilege can lack the perspective to push back on institutional malpractice or racist mindsets that may be present. In addition, it is difficult to convince those with power and privilege to give those privileges up without clear education and work to understand why doing so is a necessity for true justice in our society. Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism. Teachers must re-evaluate their curriculum. When teaching standards and core curricula have been developed for your students, it’s easy to simply follow along. However, it’s important to remember that our education system has been founded on historically racist practices, including silencing those from disenfranchised communities. It’s not just BIPOC who need to see themselves in the literature or history they study. White students need to hear those perspectives as well, just as straight and cisgender students need to read LGBTQ+ stories. This is because students need not just mirrors but also windows into other cultures, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop notes in her essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking. Those perspectives need to be diverse and empowering as well—only showing Black suffering or slavery does not begin to break down problematic beliefs about Black people. Instead, students coming from positions of power need to see and understand the power and agency of those who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly since society frequently tells them otherwise. This will allow white students and teachers to have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of our history, while also ensuring they can center BIPOC voices and be allies and accomplices instead of “saviors.” Students need to understand privilege and rethink power. Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real. The work does not stop there, though. It can be easy in teaching privilege to fall into the trap of “white guilt” or “privilege guilt” (or even “survivor guilt” for BIPOC who have moved up socioeconomically and have internalized the belief that their communities were something to be “survived”). While guilt can be an important emotion to notice and process, educators should help students move through it to a place of action. Beyond “feeling bad” about generations of oppression, how can they use this knowledge to advocate for change and begin breaking down their own racist beliefs? How can they also reframe their understandings of privilege so that they stop prioritizing hegemonic ideas of success and worth? Some of that will mean teaching students to analyze and reframe how they see values and stories from other cultures. Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice. Schools must interrogate their practices and how they gained institutional privilege to begin with. Part 2: Behind the Wall Davis et al The prisoner industrial complex, or PIC, is a continuation of slavery – it’s built on notions of stripping humanity of individuals to prioritize profit. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause has been widely contested. Activists and scholars who have tried to develop more nuanced understandings of the punishment process- and especially racism's role- have deployed the concept of the "prison industrial complex" to point out that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb "crime." Indeed, vast numbers of corporations with global markets rely on prisons as an important source of profit and thus have acquired clandestine stakes in the continued expansion of the prison system. Because the overwhelming majority of U.S. prisoners are from racially marginalized communities, corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures of racism. Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although women comprise a relatively small percentage of the entire prison popu- lation, they constitute, nevertheless, the fastest growing segment of pris- oners. There are now more women in prison in the State of California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970 (Currie 1998). Because race is a major factor in determining who goes to prison and who does not, the groups most rapidly increasing in number are black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous women. Globalization of capitalism has precipitated the decline of the welfare state in industrialized countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, and has brought about structural adjustment in the countries of the southern region. As social programs in the U.S. have been drastically curtailed, imprisonment has simultaneously become the most self-evident response to many of the social problems previously addressed by insti- tutions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc). In other words, in the era of the disestablishment of social programs that have historically served poor communities, and at a time when affirmative action programs are being dismantled and resources for education and health are declining, imprisonment functions as the default solution. Especially for women of color, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these dra- conian strategies- ever longer prison sentences for offenses that are often petty- tend to reproduce and, indeed, exacerbate the very problems they purport to solve. There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both systems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in these systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized communities throughout the world. In the case of the prison industrial complex, the transformation of imprisoned bodies of color into consumers and/or producers of an immense range of commodities effectively transforms public funds into profit, leaving little in the way of social assistance to bolster the efforts of women and men who want to overcome barriers erected by poverty and racism. For example, when women who spend many years in prison are released, instead of jobs, housing, health care, and education, they are offered a small amount of release money, which covers little more than a bus ride and two nights in an inexpensive hotel. In the "free world," they are haunted by the stigma of imprisonment, which renders it extremely difficult for a "felon" to find a job. Thus they are inevitably tracked back into a prison system that in this era of the prison industrial complex has entirely dispensed with even a semblance of rehabilitation. Some employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison. During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry. Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees. “The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays. Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage. That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry. In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines. About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25 of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5 goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant. Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration. “Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.” Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem. Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.” Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work. In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers. “Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.” Although none of the strikers’ ten demands have yet been met, the 2018 nationwide prison strike was still a remarkable event in its scope and coordination, as well as its ability to generate public support and attention. An estimated 150 different organizations endorsed the strike; citizens held numerous demonstrations outside of prisons in solidarity; and a range of national media publications provided detailed coverage of the protest’s motivations, objectives, tactics, and status as potentially the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” 7. Despite the 2018 prison strike’s apparent gravity, it is difficult to fully contextualize its significance because surprisingly little attention has been paid to prison strikes previously. For instance, just two years prior, in 2016, a similar nationwide prison strike was described as “the largest prison strike . . . you probably haven’t heard about.” 8. In light of this reality, this Note peers behind prison walls to improve our understanding of prison strikes — the end goal being to open the door to a broader discussion of why and how these strikes should receive legal protection. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. In particular, this Part provides an abbreviated overview of strikes across four key periods of prison development in the United States: (1) the inception of the American prison during the early American republic, (2) the creation of modern legal punishment and penitentiaries between the antebellum period and Reconstruction, (3) the explosion of prison systems and prison labor between Reconstruction and World War II, and finally (4) the prisoners’ rights and reform movements emerging between the end of World War II and our present-day mass incarceration system. This overview suggests that as the carceral state has expanded and evolved, so too have prison strikes — thus placing actions like the latest 2018 strike in a long tradition of prisoners organizing to express deeply held grievances. Further, examining the history of prison strikes reveals that strikes are often the only way for the incarcerated to act on those grievances — and that while strikes have rarely brought about immediate changes, they have helped initiate longer-term prison reforms and have periodically been successful in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed plight of those behind bars. Thus, I affirm: Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. They add: Harvard Law Review. Academic Journal “Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes” HLR, March 2019. JP The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader jurisprudence around hunger strikes, and this area of the law’s focus on the body, may present yet another avenue to consider. And more fundamentally, reconsidering incarceration — including the nature of penal punishment, the constitutional status of prisoners, the judiciary’s role in our carceral system, and the ability of social science and social movements to inform the law — may be needed to protect prison strikes and bring about the reforms that strikes have advocated for. There is a difficult tension in our jurisprudence on prisoners. On the one hand, prisoners are found to enjoy some constitutional rights. On the other hand, prisoners’ rights are often curtailed and must give way to the regulations that prison officials employ to maintain security and order in our correctional system. Allowing prisoners to peacefully strike allows our criminal justice system to navigate this tension, preserving the goals of prison officials while allowing prisoners to surface critical problems in prison conditions and our criminal justice system as a whole. The strikes also represent an important end unto themselves: they are an important statement of prisoners’ humanity, dignity, and entitlement to a life beyond “modern slavery.” Kaur Prison strikes create media attention that sheds light on the injustices of the prisoner industrial complex. In the unbearable heat of Rajasthan, some undertrial male prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail, locked up in small suffocating cells for up to 23 hours without ventilation or fans, resolved to take action. The prisoners started a hunger strike demanding installation of boxes where prisoners could put their complaints, and regular visits of a judge to look into their complaints (Waqar 2019). Prisoners had intimated about their hunger strike along with the demands in a letter to the prison authorities and the judge presiding over their trials. On the intervening night of 29 and 30 March 2019, some undertrial prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail were dragged and beaten up brutally, leading to fractured limbs and serious injuries. Despite the judge issuing a notice to the jail authorities, prisoners not only suffered physical beatings, but they were also charged under Sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (use of criminal force on public servant in execution of his duties) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for causing injury to a prison official’s finger, and inflicting self-harm (Hindu 2019). The most astonishing aspect of this turn of events is that the demands of the prisoners for which they started the hunger strike are the mechanisms that prison authorities should on their own be adopting as per the mandatory directions given by the Supreme Court in several cases including Sunil Batra (II) v Delhi Administration and Madhukar B Jambhale v State of Maharashtra. On 23 and 24 June, 2017 women prisoners of Byculla Jail in Mumbai rebelled to highlight torture and murder of their co-prisoner Manjula Shetye by prison staff. If it wasn’t for their strike, Manjula’s case would never have seen the light of the day. Their strike brought so much attention to Manjula’s murder in custody that not only the accused prison staff were arrested and are currently being tried, but ministers and parliamentarians have visted the prisoners. However, an first information report against the 200 women prisoners was filed for allegedly rioting, making unlawful assembly (Dalvi, 2018). 3. Petition for Redress. — Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government. 169. While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,” 170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.” 171. Id. at 145. Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons. 172. Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed; 173. inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards, 174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities, 175. are given substandard medical care, 176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances; 177. most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services; 178. and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates, 179. and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims. 180. And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden. 181. As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”; 182. Keller, supra note 172. peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world” 183. As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transformations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies. 185. See supra note 73 and accompanying text. In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions. 186. And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms. B. CONSIDERING ADDITIONAL LEGAL AVENUES FOR PROTECTING PRISON STRIKES The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” HLR 4 And strikes offer an alternative to violence and a means of collective bargaining for inmates. The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. 145. Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy. 146. Although “association” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, the Court has long recognized the right as both implicit in and derived from the First Amendment’s other express guarantees (namely speech and assembly), and as a separate substantive due process right. Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.” 147. This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.” 148. However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process; 149. in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders, 151. Id. at 738–39. with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.” 152. Id. at 729. This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them 153. Id. at 738. — creating hierarchical relationships 154. Id. at 739–40. that breed mistrust 155. Id. at 741–42. and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved. 156. Id. at 741–43. As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress. 157. Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff. Unfortunately, The academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques, that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoresing how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. Dixon: Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network Summer, Chris, “Reflections on Privilege, Reformism, and Activism”, Online To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding authentic we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally shake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be." Look to history for examples: the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday, desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints. yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles. and sharpen social contradictions. And We shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. | 11/21/21 |
ND- Prison Workers 1AC V3Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Millburn MM | Judge: Derek Hilligoss Guinier and Torres RACISM IS RAMPANT, AND DEBATE’S A PLACE TO CHALLENGE IT – rounds are practice for real world engagement of political problems. As more and more teachers, administrators, schools and organizations are questioning their practices and looking at the racist history of their institutions, many are finally asking, “How we can listen to and support Black students, teachers and communities who have been systemically silenced for too long?” This question is essential, and examining anti-Blackness in our practice is something we all must be looking at. Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is. Anti-racist work means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives—from education to housing to climate change—and then actively doing work to tear down those beliefs and structures. Those beliefs and structures don’t just exist in primarily white/and or privileged institutions—they thrive there. Schools that house mostly students and teachers who have benefited from white privilege can lack the perspective to push back on institutional malpractice or racist mindsets that may be present. In addition, it is difficult to convince those with power and privilege to give those privileges up without clear education and work to understand why doing so is a necessity for true justice in our society. Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism. Teachers must re-evaluate their curriculum. When teaching standards and core curricula have been developed for your students, it’s easy to simply follow along. However, it’s important to remember that our education system has been founded on historically racist practices, including silencing those from disenfranchised communities. It’s not just BIPOC who need to see themselves in the literature or history they study. White students need to hear those perspectives as well, just as straight and cisgender students need to read LGBTQ+ stories. This is because students need not just mirrors but also windows into other cultures, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop notes in her essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking. Those perspectives need to be diverse and empowering as well—only showing Black suffering or slavery does not begin to break down problematic beliefs about Black people. Instead, students coming from positions of power need to see and understand the power and agency of those who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly since society frequently tells them otherwise. This will allow white students and teachers to have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of our history, while also ensuring they can center BIPOC voices and be allies and accomplices instead of “saviors.” Students need to understand privilege and rethink power. Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real. The work does not stop there, though. It can be easy in teaching privilege to fall into the trap of “white guilt” or “privilege guilt” (or even “survivor guilt” for BIPOC who have moved up socioeconomically and have internalized the belief that their communities were something to be “survived”). While guilt can be an important emotion to notice and process, educators should help students move through it to a place of action. Beyond “feeling bad” about generations of oppression, how can they use this knowledge to advocate for change and begin breaking down their own racist beliefs? How can they also reframe their understandings of privilege so that they stop prioritizing hegemonic ideas of success and worth? Some of that will mean teaching students to analyze and reframe how they see values and stories from other cultures. Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice. Schools must interrogate their practices and how they gained institutional privilege to begin with. They add: Of the many political economic factors effecting Black populations in the United States, neither gentrification, deindustrialization, capital flight, nor any other such phenomenon develop by chance (Lees, 2000, 2012; Moskowitz, 2017; Paton, 2014). Rather, these processes are all part of a much larger trend within the global economy that results in a spatial, economic, and cultural reorganization of society. This new ordering of our globe happens in accord with ever-innovating forms of capitalism. Gentrification, in particular, has come to comprise “an increasingly unassailable capital accumulation strategy” by weaving “global financial markets together with large- and medium-sized real-estate developers” (Smith, 2002: 443). As capitalism enacts new rounds of accumulation through practices like gentrification, its purveyors (e.g., real estate developers, financiers, and municipal leaders) must find or create favorable conditions for that accumulation. Thus policies, relations, and regulatory identities that once inhibited the free flow of capital (tariffs, unions, Keynesian modes of governance, localized non-capitalist practices, etc.) are increasingly manipulated and done away with to facilitate new rounds of accumulation (Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Moskowitz, 2017). As a result, human and nonhuman beings are increasingly at the mercy of capitalism and its exploitations, expropriations, and expulsions (Sassen, 2014). These oppressive spatial processes continually affect Black populations. The spatial fix—described by David Harvey (2001)—preserves and propagates capitalism and also entails a racial fix(ation) as the continuation of accumulation treats certain places and populations as obsolete, in need of appropriation, removal, and erasure. For example, in the midst of efforts to accumulate surplus value through real estate development via the gentrification of Black communities, municipalities attempt to appease Black communities and capitalize on Black cultural/spatial expressions by hemming Black histories into museums as they eradicate the makers of Black history. The African American Library at the Gregory School in Houston’s Fourth Ward, the Houston Museum of African American Culture in Houston’s Third Ward, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. are examples of this phenomenon. Each cultural hub emerged as the neighborhoods and cities in which they are located underwent forms of gentrification that dislocated many Black residents and history makers. Part 2: Behind the Wall Davis et al The prisoner industrial complex, or PIC, is a continuation of slavery – it’s built on notions of stripping humanity of individuals to prioritize profit. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause has been widely contested. Activists and scholars who have tried to develop more nuanced understandings of the punishment process- and especially racism's role- have deployed the concept of the "prison industrial complex" to point out that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb "crime." Indeed, vast numbers of corporations with global markets rely on prisons as an important source of profit and thus have acquired clandestine stakes in the continued expansion of the prison system. Because the overwhelming majority of U.S. prisoners are from racially marginalized communities, corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures of racism. Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although women comprise a relatively small percentage of the entire prison popu- lation, they constitute, nevertheless, the fastest growing segment of pris- oners. There are now more women in prison in the State of California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970 (Currie 1998). Because race is a major factor in determining who goes to prison and who does not, the groups most rapidly increasing in number are black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous women. Globalization of capitalism has precipitated the decline of the welfare state in industrialized countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, and has brought about structural adjustment in the countries of the southern region. As social programs in the U.S. have been drastically curtailed, imprisonment has simultaneously become the most self-evident response to many of the social problems previously addressed by insti- tutions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc). In other words, in the era of the disestablishment of social programs that have historically served poor communities, and at a time when affirmative action programs are being dismantled and resources for education and health are declining, imprisonment functions as the default solution. Especially for women of color, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these dra- conian strategies- ever longer prison sentences for offenses that are often petty- tend to reproduce and, indeed, exacerbate the very problems they purport to solve. There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both systems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in these systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized communities throughout the world. In the case of the prison industrial complex, the transformation of imprisoned bodies of color into consumers and/or producers of an immense range of commodities effectively transforms public funds into profit, leaving little in the way of social assistance to bolster the efforts of women and men who want to overcome barriers erected by poverty and racism. For example, when women who spend many years in prison are released, instead of jobs, housing, health care, and education, they are offered a small amount of release money, which covers little more than a bus ride and two nights in an inexpensive hotel. In the "free world," they are haunted by the stigma of imprisonment, which renders it extremely difficult for a "felon" to find a job. Thus they are inevitably tracked back into a prison system that in this era of the prison industrial complex has entirely dispensed with even a semblance of rehabilitation. Some employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison. During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry. Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees. “The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays. Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage. That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry. In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines. About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25 of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5 goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant. Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration. “Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.” Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem. Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.” Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work. In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers. “Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.” Although none of the strikers’ ten demands have yet been met, the 2018 nationwide prison strike was still a remarkable event in its scope and coordination, as well as its ability to generate public support and attention. An estimated 150 different organizations endorsed the strike; citizens held numerous demonstrations outside of prisons in solidarity; and a range of national media publications provided detailed coverage of the protest’s motivations, objectives, tactics, and status as potentially the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” 7. Despite the 2018 prison strike’s apparent gravity, it is difficult to fully contextualize its significance because surprisingly little attention has been paid to prison strikes previously. For instance, just two years prior, in 2016, a similar nationwide prison strike was described as “the largest prison strike . . . you probably haven’t heard about.” 8. In light of this reality, this Note peers behind prison walls to improve our understanding of prison strikes — the end goal being to open the door to a broader discussion of why and how these strikes should receive legal protection. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. In particular, this Part provides an abbreviated overview of strikes across four key periods of prison development in the United States: (1) the inception of the American prison during the early American republic, (2) the creation of modern legal punishment and penitentiaries between the antebellum period and Reconstruction, (3) the explosion of prison systems and prison labor between Reconstruction and World War II, and finally (4) the prisoners’ rights and reform movements emerging between the end of World War II and our present-day mass incarceration system. This overview suggests that as the carceral state has expanded and evolved, so too have prison strikes — thus placing actions like the latest 2018 strike in a long tradition of prisoners organizing to express deeply held grievances. Further, examining the history of prison strikes reveals that strikes are often the only way for the incarcerated to act on those grievances — and that while strikes have rarely brought about immediate changes, they have helped initiate longer-term prison reforms and have periodically been successful in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed plight of those behind bars. Thus, I affirm: Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. They add: Harvard Law Review. Academic Journal “Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes” HLR, March 2019. https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/ JP The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader jurisprudence around hunger strikes, and this area of the law’s focus on the body, may present yet another avenue to consider. And more fundamentally, reconsidering incarceration — including the nature of penal punishment, the constitutional status of prisoners, the judiciary’s role in our carceral system, and the ability of social science and social movements to inform the law — may be needed to protect prison strikes and bring about the reforms that strikes have advocated for. There is a difficult tension in our jurisprudence on prisoners. On the one hand, prisoners are found to enjoy some constitutional rights. On the other hand, prisoners’ rights are often curtailed and must give way to the regulations that prison officials employ to maintain security and order in our correctional system. Allowing prisoners to peacefully strike allows our criminal justice system to navigate this tension, preserving the goals of prison officials while allowing prisoners to surface critical problems in prison conditions and our criminal justice system as a whole. The strikes also represent an important end unto themselves: they are an important statement of prisoners’ humanity, dignity, and entitlement to a life beyond “modern slavery.” Kaur Prison strikes create media attention that sheds light on the injustices of the prisoner industrial complex. In the unbearable heat of Rajasthan, some undertrial male prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail, locked up in small suffocating cells for up to 23 hours without ventilation or fans, resolved to take action. The prisoners started a hunger strike demanding installation of boxes where prisoners could put their complaints, and regular visits of a judge to look into their complaints (Waqar 2019). Prisoners had intimated about their hunger strike along with the demands in a letter to the prison authorities and the judge presiding over their trials. On the intervening night of 29 and 30 March 2019, some undertrial prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail were dragged and beaten up brutally, leading to fractured limbs and serious injuries. Despite the judge issuing a notice to the jail authorities, prisoners not only suffered physical beatings, but they were also charged under Sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (use of criminal force on public servant in execution of his duties) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for causing injury to a prison official’s finger, and inflicting self-harm (Hindu 2019). The most astonishing aspect of this turn of events is that the demands of the prisoners for which they started the hunger strike are the mechanisms that prison authorities should on their own be adopting as per the mandatory directions given by the Supreme Court in several cases including Sunil Batra (II) v Delhi Administration and Madhukar B Jambhale v State of Maharashtra. On 23 and 24 June, 2017 women prisoners of Byculla Jail in Mumbai rebelled to highlight torture and murder of their co-prisoner Manjula Shetye by prison staff. If it wasn’t for their strike, Manjula’s case would never have seen the light of the day. Their strike brought so much attention to Manjula’s murder in custody that not only the accused prison staff were arrested and are currently being tried, but ministers and parliamentarians have visted the prisoners. However, an first information report against the 200 women prisoners was filed for allegedly rioting, making unlawful assembly (Dalvi, 2018). 3. Petition for Redress. — Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government. 169. While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,” 170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.” 171. Id. at 145. Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons. 172. Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed; 173. inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards, 174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities, 175. are given substandard medical care, 176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances; 177. most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services; 178. and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates, 179. and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims. 180. And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden. 181. As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”; 182. Keller, supra note 172. peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world” 183. As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transformations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies. 185. See supra note 73 and accompanying text. In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions. 186. And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms. B. CONSIDERING ADDITIONAL LEGAL AVENUES FOR PROTECTING PRISON STRIKES The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” HLR 4 And strikes offer an alternative to violence and a means of collective bargaining for inmates. The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. 145. Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy. 146. Although “association” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, the Court has long recognized the right as both implicit in and derived from the First Amendment’s other express guarantees (namely speech and assembly), and as a separate substantive due process right. Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.” 147. This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.” 148. However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process; 149. in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders, 151. Id. at 738–39. with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.” 152. Id. at 729. This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them 153. Id. at 738. — creating hierarchical relationships 154. Id. at 739–40. that breed mistrust 155. Id. at 741–42. and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved. 156. Id. at 741–43. As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress. 157. Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff. 158. And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change” 160. — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates, 161. Note, supra note 148, at 751–52. all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order. 162. Dixon: Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network Summer, Chris, “Reflections on Privilege, Reformism, and Activism”, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-dixon-reflections-on-privilege-reformism-and-activism-a-response-to-sasha-k-s-activism-an Online To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding authentic we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally shake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be." Look to history for examples: the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday, desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints. yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen social contradictions. And We shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. | 11/21/21 |
ND- Prison Workers 1AC V4Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Harker AR | Judge: Panel Guinier and Torres RACISM IS RAMPANT, AND DEBATE’S A PLACE TO CHALLENGE IT – rounds are practice for real world engagement of political problems. As more and more teachers, administrators, schools and organizations are questioning their practices and looking at the racist history of their institutions, many are finally asking, “How we can listen to and support Black students, teachers and communities who have been systemically silenced for too long?” This question is essential, and examining anti-Blackness in our practice is something we all must be looking at. Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is. Anti-racist work means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives—from education to housing to climate change—and then actively doing work to tear down those beliefs and structures. Those beliefs and structures don’t just exist in primarily white/and or privileged institutions—they thrive there. Schools that house mostly students and teachers who have benefited from white privilege can lack the perspective to push back on institutional malpractice or racist mindsets that may be present. In addition, it is difficult to convince those with power and privilege to give those privileges up without clear education and work to understand why doing so is a necessity for true justice in our society. Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism. Teachers must re-evaluate their curriculum. When teaching standards and core curricula have been developed for your students, it’s easy to simply follow along. However, it’s important to remember that our education system has been founded on historically racist practices, including silencing those from disenfranchised communities. It’s not just BIPOC who need to see themselves in the literature or history they study. White students need to hear those perspectives as well, just as straight and cisgender students need to read LGBTQ+ stories. This is because students need not just mirrors but also windows into other cultures, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop notes in her essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking. Those perspectives need to be diverse and empowering as well—only showing Black suffering or slavery does not begin to break down problematic beliefs about Black people. Instead, students coming from positions of power need to see and understand the power and agency of those who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly since society frequently tells them otherwise. This will allow white students and teachers to have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of our history, while also ensuring they can center BIPOC voices and be allies and accomplices instead of “saviors.” Students need to understand privilege and rethink power. Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real. The work does not stop there, though. It can be easy in teaching privilege to fall into the trap of “white guilt” or “privilege guilt” (or even “survivor guilt” for BIPOC who have moved up socioeconomically and have internalized the belief that their communities were something to be “survived”). While guilt can be an important emotion to notice and process, educators should help students move through it to a place of action. Beyond “feeling bad” about generations of oppression, how can they use this knowledge to advocate for change and begin breaking down their own racist beliefs? How can they also reframe their understandings of privilege so that they stop prioritizing hegemonic ideas of success and worth? Some of that will mean teaching students to analyze and reframe how they see values and stories from other cultures. Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice. Schools must interrogate their practices and how they gained institutional privilege to begin with. Part 2: Behind the Wall Davis et al The prisoner industrial complex, or PIC, is a continuation of slavery – it’s built on notions of stripping humanity of individuals to prioritize profit. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause has been widely contested. Activists and scholars who have tried to develop more nuanced understandings of the punishment process- and especially racism's role- have deployed the concept of the "prison industrial complex" to point out that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb "crime." Indeed, vast numbers of corporations with global markets rely on prisons as an important source of profit and thus have acquired clandestine stakes in the continued expansion of the prison system. Because the overwhelming majority of U.S. prisoners are from racially marginalized communities, corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures of racism. Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although women comprise a relatively small percentage of the entire prison popu- lation, they constitute, nevertheless, the fastest growing segment of pris- oners. There are now more women in prison in the State of California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970 (Currie 1998). Because race is a major factor in determining who goes to prison and who does not, the groups most rapidly increasing in number are black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous women. Globalization of capitalism has precipitated the decline of the welfare state in industrialized countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, and has brought about structural adjustment in the countries of the southern region. As social programs in the U.S. have been drastically curtailed, imprisonment has simultaneously become the most self-evident response to many of the social problems previously addressed by insti- tutions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc). In other words, in the era of the disestablishment of social programs that have historically served poor communities, and at a time when affirmative action programs are being dismantled and resources for education and health are declining, imprisonment functions as the default solution. Especially for women of color, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these dra- conian strategies- ever longer prison sentences for offenses that are often petty- tend to reproduce and, indeed, exacerbate the very problems they purport to solve. There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both systems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in these systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized communities throughout the world. In the case of the prison industrial complex, the transformation of imprisoned bodies of color into consumers and/or producers of an immense range of commodities effectively transforms public funds into profit, leaving little in the way of social assistance to bolster the efforts of women and men who want to overcome barriers erected by poverty and racism. For example, when women who spend many years in prison are released, instead of jobs, housing, health care, and education, they are offered a small amount of release money, which covers little more than a bus ride and two nights in an inexpensive hotel. In the "free world," they are haunted by the stigma of imprisonment, which renders it extremely difficult for a "felon" to find a job. Thus they are inevitably tracked back into a prison system that in this era of the prison industrial complex has entirely dispensed with even a semblance of rehabilitation. Some employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison. During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry. Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees. “The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays. Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage. That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry. In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines. About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25 of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5 goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant. Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration. “Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.” Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem. Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.” Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work. In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers. “Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.” Although none of the strikers’ ten demands have yet been met, the 2018 nationwide prison strike was still a remarkable event in its scope and coordination, as well as its ability to generate public support and attention. An estimated 150 different organizations endorsed the strike; citizens held numerous demonstrations outside of prisons in solidarity; and a range of national media publications provided detailed coverage of the protest’s motivations, objectives, tactics, and status as potentially the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” 7. Despite the 2018 prison strike’s apparent gravity, it is difficult to fully contextualize its significance because surprisingly little attention has been paid to prison strikes previously. For instance, just two years prior, in 2016, a similar nationwide prison strike was described as “the largest prison strike . . . you probably haven’t heard about.” 8. In light of this reality, this Note peers behind prison walls to improve our understanding of prison strikes — the end goal being to open the door to a broader discussion of why and how these strikes should receive legal protection. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. In particular, this Part provides an abbreviated overview of strikes across four key periods of prison development in the United States: (1) the inception of the American prison during the early American republic, (2) the creation of modern legal punishment and penitentiaries between the antebellum period and Reconstruction, (3) the explosion of prison systems and prison labor between Reconstruction and World War II, and finally (4) the prisoners’ rights and reform movements emerging between the end of World War II and our present-day mass incarceration system. This overview suggests that as the carceral state has expanded and evolved, so too have prison strikes — thus placing actions like the latest 2018 strike in a long tradition of prisoners organizing to express deeply held grievances. Further, examining the history of prison strikes reveals that strikes are often the only way for the incarcerated to act on those grievances — and that while strikes have rarely brought about immediate changes, they have helped initiate longer-term prison reforms and have periodically been successful in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed plight of those behind bars. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. They add: Harvard Law Review. Academic Journal “Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes” HLR, March 2019. https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/ JP The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader jurisprudence around hunger strikes, and this area of the law’s focus on the body, may present yet another avenue to consider. And more fundamentally, reconsidering incarceration — including the nature of penal punishment, the constitutional status of prisoners, the judiciary’s role in our carceral system, and the ability of social science and social movements to inform the law — may be needed to protect prison strikes and bring about the reforms that strikes have advocated for. There is a difficult tension in our jurisprudence on prisoners. On the one hand, prisoners are found to enjoy some constitutional rights. On the other hand, prisoners’ rights are often curtailed and must give way to the regulations that prison officials employ to maintain security and order in our correctional system. Allowing prisoners to peacefully strike allows our criminal justice system to navigate this tension, preserving the goals of prison officials while allowing prisoners to surface critical problems in prison conditions and our criminal justice system as a whole. The strikes also represent an important end unto themselves: they are an important statement of prisoners’ humanity, dignity, and entitlement to a life beyond “modern slavery.” Kaur Prison strikes create media attention that sheds light on the injustices of the prisoner industrial complex. In the unbearable heat of Rajasthan, some undertrial male prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail, locked up in small suffocating cells for up to 23 hours without ventilation or fans, resolved to take action. The prisoners started a hunger strike demanding installation of boxes where prisoners could put their complaints, and regular visits of a judge to look into their complaints (Waqar 2019). Prisoners had intimated about their hunger strike along with the demands in a letter to the prison authorities and the judge presiding over their trials. On the intervening night of 29 and 30 March 2019, some undertrial prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail were dragged and beaten up brutally, leading to fractured limbs and serious injuries. Despite the judge issuing a notice to the jail authorities, prisoners not only suffered physical beatings, but they were also charged under Sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (use of criminal force on public servant in execution of his duties) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for causing injury to a prison official’s finger, and inflicting self-harm (Hindu 2019). The most astonishing aspect of this turn of events is that the demands of the prisoners for which they started the hunger strike are the mechanisms that prison authorities should on their own be adopting as per the mandatory directions given by the Supreme Court in several cases including Sunil Batra (II) v Delhi Administration and Madhukar B Jambhale v State of Maharashtra. On 23 and 24 June, 2017 women prisoners of Byculla Jail in Mumbai rebelled to highlight torture and murder of their co-prisoner Manjula Shetye by prison staff. If it wasn’t for their strike, Manjula’s case would never have seen the light of the day. Their strike brought so much attention to Manjula’s murder in custody that not only the accused prison staff were arrested and are currently being tried, but ministers and parliamentarians have visted the prisoners. However, an first information report against the 200 women prisoners was filed for allegedly rioting, making unlawful assembly (Dalvi, 2018). 3. Petition for Redress. — Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government. 169. While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,” 170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.” 171. Id. at 145. Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons. 172. Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed; 173. inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards, 174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities, 175. are given substandard medical care, 176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances; 177. most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services; 178. and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates, 179. and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims. 180. And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden. 181. As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”; 182. Keller, supra note 172. peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world” 183. As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transformations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies. 185. See supra note 73 and accompanying text. In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions. 186. And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms. B. CONSIDERING ADDITIONAL LEGAL AVENUES FOR PROTECTING PRISON STRIKES The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” The prison strike is an overdue opportunity to end the slavery of incarcerated people If criminal justice reform is truly a bipartisan issue, then politicians should accept the demands of those striking. In prison, days are filled with activities dedicated to getting your immediate needs met and, outside of an occasional fantasy, planning for any collective future in prison is rare. You must focus on the now, to get to the next now. Besides, it’s hard to maintain a long-range or expansive worldview when you live in a box. As a result, when prisoners do demand better conditions, they tend to focus on securing a different food offering in the commissary or thicker sweatshirts, prioritizing short-term satisfaction over lasting change. That’s how famed psychologist and originator of the “hierarchy of needs” Abraham Maslow says all human beings behave: Basic physiological needs first, self-actualization later. But the national prisoner strike that started on Tuesday and will last until Sept. 9 is different. The list of 10 demands formulated by the various inmate organizers is strategic and smart and, if achieved, could change American penological practices for the better. The first demand, that all prisoners be treated humanely, would probably entail action on the remaining nine demands. But, of those, three are particularly worth highlighting for their potential impact and ease of passage — especially since criminal justice reform is now billed as bipartisan. The strikers' third demand is to repeal the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act, a Clinton-era law supposedly aimed at reducing the number of frivolous lawsuits filed by inmates. (The famous example used to promote its passage was the inmate who sued because he was delivered the wrong style peanut butter by the commissary.) To curb abuses, the statute instituted a grievance “exhaustion requirement,” directing inmates to use internal administrative remedies to solve problems before resorting to litigation. But the law backfired because the people who run the grievance system are often the ones about whom prisoners need to file complaints. Thus, it’s almost impossible for an inmate to exhaust his or her remedies (let alone resolve a grievance) in order to file a lawsuit at all. Their seventh demand is that every prisoner should have access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention; currently, many people convicted of violent crimes are simply denied access to such programs. Because I’ve lived with people who’ve committed crimes, I know that one violent act does not a violent person make. But inmates have no constitutional right to rehabilitation, even if we all know that it's key to living well-adjusted lives in and out of institutional settings. Most people agree that a system that handles people accused of breaking the law should give them the tools and the opportunities to behave better and improve their lives. Part of rehabilitating someone is teaching them that, when they do good, they have at least a chance of succeeding. Denying them rehabilitation is denying them a chance to succeed as law-abiding citizens. And the 10th demand is for the voting rights of all confined citizens (both those serving prison sentences and pretrial detainees) and formerly incarcerated people must be counted. One of the reasons that the trillion dollar failure we call our criminal justice system is allowed to continue without major reformation year after year is that the people who know its problems best and have new ideas for solutions have little to no political power. But, beyond that, restricting voting rights of citizens falls into a distinctly racist pattern; it’s no accident that the two whitest states in the country — Maine and Vermont —never disenfranchise voters. Even prisoners there can cast ballots. But states with larger black populations disenfranchise more people for a criminal past. Felony disenfranchisement is blatant, institutional suppression of the black vote. The Marshall Project recently reported that even people who are eligible to vote again after incarceration don’t know about their rights. That’s how felony disenfranchisement is so invidious — through misinformation and a lack of education, we end up disenfranchising ourselves. This lack of education on voting rights isn’t an oversight; it’s intentional. Illinois House Bill 4469, for instance, would help pretrial detainees vote while incarcerated. But, after both legislative chambers passed the bill, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner just vetoed it because it contained a provision that taught inmates about their voting rights as they discharged from custody, even though Illinois is one of 14 states where inmates are eligible to vote as soon as they leave the prison. As the strikers demand, it's time to start treating incarcerated people humanely, and as human beings. Sociological, economic and legal explanations of crime abound, but my experience taught me that many people who commit crimes do so because it’s one area of their lives where they’re effective. They can make the money to feed their families; they feel safe when they carry guns. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs again. The challenge in creating a safe and law-abiding society is to guarantee that people can achieve that feeling of self-efficacy to everyone in lawful endeavors. That's one reason that this strike is different than ones past: It's not intended simply to reform prison conditions, but to restructure the carceral system, and how it affects people's access to the world outside. Giving in to the strikers' demands isn’t giving up; it’s part of a move forward. In the spirit of rehabilitation, of teaching incarcerated people that well-planned and properly motivated efforts at change can be rewarded, even if only minimally, administrators need to work with inmates on this one. The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. 145. Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy. 146. Although “association” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, the Court has long recognized the right as both implicit in and derived from the First Amendment’s other express guarantees (namely speech and assembly), and as a separate substantive due process right. Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.” 147. This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.” 148. However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process; 149. in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders, 151. Id. at 738–39. with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.” 152. Id. at 729. This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them 153. Id. at 738. — creating hierarchical relationships 154. Id. at 739–40. that breed mistrust 155. Id. at 741–42. and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved. 156. Id. at 741–43. As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress. 157. Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff. 158. And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change” 160. — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation | 11/22/21 |
ND- Prison Workers 1AC V5Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Harker DV | Judge: Andrew Wixson Guinier and Torres RACISM IS RAMPANT, AND DEBATE’S A PLACE TO CHALLENGE IT – rounds are practice for real world engagement of political problems. As more and more teachers, administrators, schools and organizations are questioning their practices and looking at the racist history of their institutions, many are finally asking, “How we can listen to and support Black students, teachers and communities who have been systemically silenced for too long?” This question is essential, and examining anti-Blackness in our practice is something we all must be looking at. Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is. Anti-racist work means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives—from education to housing to climate change—and then actively doing work to tear down those beliefs and structures. Those beliefs and structures don’t just exist in primarily white/and or privileged institutions—they thrive there. Schools that house mostly students and teachers who have benefited from white privilege can lack the perspective to push back on institutional malpractice or racist mindsets that may be present. In addition, it is difficult to convince those with power and privilege to give those privileges up without clear education and work to understand why doing so is a necessity for true justice in our society. Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism. Teachers must re-evaluate their curriculum. When teaching standards and core curricula have been developed for your students, it’s easy to simply follow along. However, it’s important to remember that our education system has been founded on historically racist practices, including silencing those from disenfranchised communities. It’s not just BIPOC who need to see themselves in the literature or history they study. White students need to hear those perspectives as well, just as straight and cisgender students need to read LGBTQ+ stories. This is because students need not just mirrors but also windows into other cultures, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop notes in her essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking. Those perspectives need to be diverse and empowering as well—only showing Black suffering or slavery does not begin to break down problematic beliefs about Black people. Instead, students coming from positions of power need to see and understand the power and agency of those who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly since society frequently tells them otherwise. This will allow white students and teachers to have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of our history, while also ensuring they can center BIPOC voices and be allies and accomplices instead of “saviors.” Students need to understand privilege and rethink power. Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real. The work does not stop there, though. It can be easy in teaching privilege to fall into the trap of “white guilt” or “privilege guilt” (or even “survivor guilt” for BIPOC who have moved up socioeconomically and have internalized the belief that their communities were something to be “survived”). While guilt can be an important emotion to notice and process, educators should help students move through it to a place of action. Beyond “feeling bad” about generations of oppression, how can they use this knowledge to advocate for change and begin breaking down their own racist beliefs? How can they also reframe their understandings of privilege so that they stop prioritizing hegemonic ideas of success and worth? Some of that will mean teaching students to analyze and reframe how they see values and stories from other cultures. Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice. Schools must interrogate their practices and how they gained institutional privilege to begin with. Part 2: Behind the Wall Davis et al The prisoner industrial complex, or PIC, is a continuation of slavery – it’s built on notions of stripping humanity of individuals to prioritize profit. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause has been widely contested. Activists and scholars who have tried to develop more nuanced understandings of the punishment process- and especially racism's role- have deployed the concept of the "prison industrial complex" to point out that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb "crime." Indeed, vast numbers of corporations with global markets rely on prisons as an important source of profit and thus have acquired clandestine stakes in the continued expansion of the prison system. Because the overwhelming majority of U.S. prisoners are from racially marginalized communities, corporate stakes in an expanding apparatus of punishment necessarily rely on and promote old as well as new structures of racism. Women especially have been hurt by these developments. Although women comprise a relatively small percentage of the entire prison popu- lation, they constitute, nevertheless, the fastest growing segment of pris- oners. There are now more women in prison in the State of California alone than there were in the United States as a whole in 1970 (Currie 1998). Because race is a major factor in determining who goes to prison and who does not, the groups most rapidly increasing in number are black, Latina, Asian-American, and indigenous women. Globalization of capitalism has precipitated the decline of the welfare state in industrialized countries, such as the U.S. and Britain, and has brought about structural adjustment in the countries of the southern region. As social programs in the U.S. have been drastically curtailed, imprisonment has simultaneously become the most self-evident response to many of the social problems previously addressed by insti- tutions such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (afdc). In other words, in the era of the disestablishment of social programs that have historically served poor communities, and at a time when affirmative action programs are being dismantled and resources for education and health are declining, imprisonment functions as the default solution. Especially for women of color, who are hardest hit by the withdrawing of social resources and their replacement with imprisonment, these dra- conian strategies- ever longer prison sentences for offenses that are often petty- tend to reproduce and, indeed, exacerbate the very problems they purport to solve. There is an ironic but telling similarity between the economic impact of the prison industrial complex and that of the military industrial complex, with which it shares important structural features. Both systems simultaneously produce vast profits and social destruction. What is beneficial to the corporations, politicians, and state entities involved in these systems brings blight and death to poor and racially marginalized communities throughout the world. In the case of the prison industrial complex, the transformation of imprisoned bodies of color into consumers and/or producers of an immense range of commodities effectively transforms public funds into profit, leaving little in the way of social assistance to bolster the efforts of women and men who want to overcome barriers erected by poverty and racism. For example, when women who spend many years in prison are released, instead of jobs, housing, health care, and education, they are offered a small amount of release money, which covers little more than a bus ride and two nights in an inexpensive hotel. In the "free world," they are haunted by the stigma of imprisonment, which renders it extremely difficult for a "felon" to find a job. Thus they are inevitably tracked back into a prison system that in this era of the prison industrial complex has entirely dispensed with even a semblance of rehabilitation. Some employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison. During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry. Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees. “The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays. Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage. That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry. In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines. About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25 of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5 goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant. Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration. “Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.” Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem. Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.” Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work. In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers. “Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.” Although none of the strikers’ ten demands have yet been met, the 2018 nationwide prison strike was still a remarkable event in its scope and coordination, as well as its ability to generate public support and attention. An estimated 150 different organizations endorsed the strike; citizens held numerous demonstrations outside of prisons in solidarity; and a range of national media publications provided detailed coverage of the protest’s motivations, objectives, tactics, and status as potentially the “largest prison strike in U.S. history.” 7. Despite the 2018 prison strike’s apparent gravity, it is difficult to fully contextualize its significance because surprisingly little attention has been paid to prison strikes previously. For instance, just two years prior, in 2016, a similar nationwide prison strike was described as “the largest prison strike . . . you probably haven’t heard about.” 8. In light of this reality, this Note peers behind prison walls to improve our understanding of prison strikes — the end goal being to open the door to a broader discussion of why and how these strikes should receive legal protection. Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. In particular, this Part provides an abbreviated overview of strikes across four key periods of prison development in the United States: (1) the inception of the American prison during the early American republic, (2) the creation of modern legal punishment and penitentiaries between the antebellum period and Reconstruction, (3) the explosion of prison systems and prison labor between Reconstruction and World War II, and finally (4) the prisoners’ rights and reform movements emerging between the end of World War II and our present-day mass incarceration system. This overview suggests that as the carceral state has expanded and evolved, so too have prison strikes — thus placing actions like the latest 2018 strike in a long tradition of prisoners organizing to express deeply held grievances. Further, examining the history of prison strikes reveals that strikes are often the only way for the incarcerated to act on those grievances — and that while strikes have rarely brought about immediate changes, they have helped initiate longer-term prison reforms and have periodically been successful in drawing attention to the otherwise unnoticed plight of those behind bars. Thus, I affirm: Part I briefly documents America’s history of prison strikes, showing that the 2018 nationwide strike is the latest in a long, important tradition of prisoners using the only real means available to them — collective actions against prison administrators — to protest labor conditions and other deeply held grievances. Part II then evaluates the legal framework governing prison strikes, demonstrating that such strikes likely do not receive sufficient protections under either the Constitution or federal and state statutes and therefore can be shut down by prison administrators without fear of judicial oversight. Part III, informed by the rich history of prison strikes, argues that their potential and demonstrated value demands, at the very least, consideration of the merits of protecting incarcerated individuals’ right to strike, and it contends that the First Amendment framework offers one potential avenue to allow prisoners to peacefully surface pressing problems in our carceral system and to collectively express their humanity and dignity. I. PRISON STRIKE BACKGROUND AND HISTORY The term “prison strike” encompasses a range of nonviolent collective actions by prisoners — namely work stoppages, sit-ins, spending boycotts, hunger strikes, and other forms of protest — that challenge the rule or order of prison administration and generally disrupt “business as usual” within the prison. 9. Prison strikes differ from other forms of collective action in prisons, including prison riots and rebellions, in that they are peaceful forms of resistance: they do not involve the threat or the use of force against persons or property. 10. And prison strikes differ from other forms of prison disturbances, like individual inmate protests, that are not collective in nature and therefore do not disrupt normal prison activity or obstruct prison officials’ control. 11. See id. Generally speaking, prison strikes (and prisoner collective action more broadly) have not received rigorous scholarly or media analysis until very recently. Social scientists, legal scholars, and the press have largely failed to provide a systematic accounting of the history and place of prisoner protest in the American penal system, particularly prior to the early to mid-twentieth century. 12. Against this backdrop of scarce attention, this Part briefly considers the history of prison strikes, both to illuminate an important but overlooked aspect of prison life and to inform the legal analysis that follows. They add: Harvard Law Review. Academic Journal “Striking the Right Balance: Toward a Better Understanding of Prison Strikes” HLR, March 2019. https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/03/striking-the-right-balance-toward-a-better-understanding-of-prison-strikes/ JP The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” But this Note acknowledges that judicial recognition of prison strikes’ First Amendment values requires significant doctrinal change. Convincing the Supreme Court to overturn its Jones and Turner precedents, and instead to adopt a test with less deference than is currently afforded to prison administrators, is unlikely. As a result, future research is necessary to identify other potential avenues to consider the legal status and merits of prison strikes. As alluded to above, labor law presents one such promising avenue, as does state constitutional and statutory law. Drawing from the broader jurisprudence around hunger strikes, and this area of the law’s focus on the body, may present yet another avenue to consider. And more fundamentally, reconsidering incarceration — including the nature of penal punishment, the constitutional status of prisoners, the judiciary’s role in our carceral system, and the ability of social science and social movements to inform the law — may be needed to protect prison strikes and bring about the reforms that strikes have advocated for. There is a difficult tension in our jurisprudence on prisoners. On the one hand, prisoners are found to enjoy some constitutional rights. On the other hand, prisoners’ rights are often curtailed and must give way to the regulations that prison officials employ to maintain security and order in our correctional system. Allowing prisoners to peacefully strike allows our criminal justice system to navigate this tension, preserving the goals of prison officials while allowing prisoners to surface critical problems in prison conditions and our criminal justice system as a whole. The strikes also represent an important end unto themselves: they are an important statement of prisoners’ humanity, dignity, and entitlement to a life beyond “modern slavery.” Kaur Prison strikes create media attention that sheds light on the injustices of the prisoner industrial complex. In the unbearable heat of Rajasthan, some undertrial male prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail, locked up in small suffocating cells for up to 23 hours without ventilation or fans, resolved to take action. The prisoners started a hunger strike demanding installation of boxes where prisoners could put their complaints, and regular visits of a judge to look into their complaints (Waqar 2019). Prisoners had intimated about their hunger strike along with the demands in a letter to the prison authorities and the judge presiding over their trials. On the intervening night of 29 and 30 March 2019, some undertrial prisoners in Jaipur Central Jail were dragged and beaten up brutally, leading to fractured limbs and serious injuries. Despite the judge issuing a notice to the jail authorities, prisoners not only suffered physical beatings, but they were also charged under Sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (use of criminal force on public servant in execution of his duties) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for causing injury to a prison official’s finger, and inflicting self-harm (Hindu 2019). The most astonishing aspect of this turn of events is that the demands of the prisoners for which they started the hunger strike are the mechanisms that prison authorities should on their own be adopting as per the mandatory directions given by the Supreme Court in several cases including Sunil Batra (II) v Delhi Administration and Madhukar B Jambhale v State of Maharashtra. On 23 and 24 June, 2017 women prisoners of Byculla Jail in Mumbai rebelled to highlight torture and murder of their co-prisoner Manjula Shetye by prison staff. If it wasn’t for their strike, Manjula’s case would never have seen the light of the day. Their strike brought so much attention to Manjula’s murder in custody that not only the accused prison staff were arrested and are currently being tried, but ministers and parliamentarians have visted the prisoners. However, an first information report against the 200 women prisoners was filed for allegedly rioting, making unlawful assembly (Dalvi, 2018). 3. Petition for Redress. — Inmates’ strikes can be seen not only as expressions of their dignity and general efforts to express their voices beyond prison walls but also as significant methods of assembly to call attention to specific grievances and seek redress from the government. 169. While in theory “there is no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country,” 170 in practice, “prisons often escape the daily microscope focused on other American institutions such as schools, churches, and government.” 171. Id. at 145. Courts grant prison administrators wide deference not only in running day-to-day life within prisons but also in restricting press access to prisons. 172. Therefore, much of the American public — already closed off from and largely indifferent to the lives of prisoners — is kept even more in the dark about prison conditions and the state of our carceral system as a whole. Prison conditions, from what has been documented, are horrendous across states. Many prisons are severely overcrowded and seriously understaffed; 173. inmates routinely experience physical abuse and even death at the hands of prison guards, 174 receive inadequate protection from guards, are deprived of basic necessities, 175. are given substandard medical care, 176 and are forced to live in squalor and tolerate extreme circumstances; 177. most prisoners have minimal, if any, access, to rehabilitative or mental health services; 178. and prisoners have little legal recourse, as internal prison grievance procedures are often stacked against inmates, 179. and judicial deference and federal legislation have effectively shut the courthouse doors on prisoners’ civil rights claims. 180. And across prisons, criminal sentencing laws not only have contributed to an unprecedented era of mass incarceration, but also have forced African Americans and people of color broadly to bear much of this burden. 181. As the Marshall Project states, “society won’t fix a prison system it can’t see”; 182. Keller, supra note 172. peaceful prison strikes like the 2018 strike, however, draw back the “iron curtain” of prison walls, bringing to light many of the pressing issues described above. Through these strikes, inmates are able not only to express their grievances to their prison administrators, but also to “publicize their on-the-ground realities to the larger world” 183. As recent history has shown, inmates have experienced some success by pressing their claims against the government through publicized strikes. For example, as described above, the California strikes in 2011 and 2013 generated public outcry that eventually resulted in transformations to the California prison system’s solitary confinement policies. 185. See supra note 73 and accompanying text. In Alabama, inmates’ participation in the 2016 nationwide prison strike helped prompt the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the state’s prison conditions. 186. And more broadly speaking, strikes like the 2018 strike have begun to “remedy power imbalances, bring aggregate structural harms into view, and shift deeply entrenched legal and constitutional” barriers to critical prison reforms. B. CONSIDERING ADDITIONAL LEGAL AVENUES FOR PROTECTING PRISON STRIKES The foregoing analysis suggests that the First Amendment is a critical, worthwhile vehicle for considering the merits of a right to strike for prisoners. As Justice Black recognized, the importance of such analysis likely transcends prisoners themselves. He wrote: “I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.” As a threshold matter, state and federal statutory law provides no recourse for protecting prison strikes. Incarcerated individuals are not included as protected “employees” in the text of federal labor laws like the Fair Labor Standards and the National Labor Relations Act, and courts have refused to extend the protections that these statutes offer to those confined within prison walls. Further, this Note is aware of no state labor laws, or for that matter any state constitutional provisions, that have been interpreted to allow prisoners to strike. Not only are prison strikes not protected by statutory law — they also are often explicitly prohibited. State statutes and prison regulations pose the most immediate barrier to prison strike activity, as states across the union appear to categorically bar prison strikes and other forms of inmate collective organizing. For instance, Alaska’s administrative code lists “participation in an organized work stoppage” and “encouraging others to engage in a food strike” as “high-moderate infractions.” Some other states have adopted similar statutory or administrative provisions. For a related analysis of state statutes and prison regulations governing prison “protest speech,” see Andrea C. Armstrong, Racial Origins of Doctrines Limiting Prisoner Protest Speech,. The same is true at the federal level, as the Bureau of Prisons has made “eengaging in or encouraging a group demonstration” and “encouraging others to refuse to work, or to participate in a work stoppage” prohibited acts. Further research is certainly necessary to develop a fuller, more nuanced treatment of the various state and federal statutory schemes that impact prison strikes. Further research could reveal differences across states in the severity of punishment for prison strike activity, as well as the scope of permissible collective action by prisoners. This could, in turn, reveal possible avenues for potentially protecting prisoners’ ability to strike. See, e.g., In re Gomez, 201 Cal. Rptr. 3d 124 (Ct. App. 2016) (holding that an inmate participating in a broader hunger strike and work stoppage across California prisons did not violate a California regulation that requires inmates to “refrain from behavior that might lead to violence or disorder, or otherwise endangers the facility, outside community or other person,” . As the court held in that case, none of the accusations against the inmate regarding striking “suggested prison operations were thrown into disorder.” Id. at 137. But even this brief overview drives home a clear bottom line: that state and federal laws, in their current forms, likely offer no viable protection for prison strikes and indeed often prohibit them outright. The right to strike within prisons may be conceptually viewed as a composite of three separate fundamental First Amendment freedoms: the freedom to peacefully associate, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble and petition for redress of grievances. 145. Each is considered in turn. 1. Association. — The right to peaceful association is one that captures the right of individuals to commune with others for the expression of ideas and for effective advocacy. 146. Although “association” does not appear in the text of the First Amendment, the Court has long recognized the right as both implicit in and derived from the First Amendment’s other express guarantees (namely speech and assembly), and as a separate substantive due process right. Strikes, like prison unions, represent an important means of association for prisoners — allowing them to “lay claim to a social identity as ‘workers’ . . . and in doing so generate claims to respect and solidarity.” 147. This identity and solidarity can, in turn, enable inmates to engage in productive and peaceful bargains with prison officials for better conditions, higher pay, and other reform desires. Bargaining is, in many respects, already very common in prisons, “for the simple reason that prison administrators rarely have sufficient resources to gain complete conformity to all the rules.” 148. However, such bargaining typically happens in an informal, ongoing, private process; 149. in their recurrent, day-to-day contact with inmates, prison administrators use their arsenal of tools to “negotiate” only with select inmate leaders, 151. Id. at 738–39. with the central goal of maintaining “short term surface order.” 152. Id. at 729. This informal bargaining is “dysfunctional” to the long-term stability of prison institutions and “the real needs of those incarcerated within” them 153. Id. at 738. — creating hierarchical relationships 154. Id. at 739–40. that breed mistrust 155. Id. at 741–42. and leave many inmates powerless and feeling aggrieved. 156. Id. at 741–43. As a result, inmates often feel that they have to resort to violence to protect themselves from exploitation, express their dissatisfaction, and obtain redress. 157. Alternatively, peaceful, collective prison strikes avoid these harmful consequences by allowing for “open” and “formal” negotiations between all inmates and prison staff. 158. And by permitting peaceful strikes, prison administrators “provide inmates with a channel for airing grievances and gaining official response . . . giving the institution a kind of safety-valve for peaceful, rather than violent, change” 160. — avoiding potentially expensive and time-consuming litigation and even helping rehabilitate inmates, 161. Note, supra note 148, at 751–52. all while deemphasizing hierarchical structures in prisons that harm institutional order. 162. The lack of oversight has become dangerous. While we don’t know the numbers of prisoners who are injured at work (OSHA maintains that data on employees only), we do have stories about allegations of substandard care and dangerous working conditions. In one case, a Georgia man who lost his leg after a fall in a prison kitchen won $550,000 from the state after claiming that a prison doctor neglected his injury. Other inmates have lost thumbs and fingers when they were caught in machinery. In Pueblo, Colorado, a female inmate, Kara Fuelling, was almost decapitated while working in a saw mill when a blade tore through her helmet. In California, two inmates conscripted into firefighting detail through the state Department of Corrections lost their lives. In Georgia, just this past May, a prisoner on work detail was killed by a distracted driver passing the highway work site. Although it could be argued that these injuries and deaths can happen anywhere, the difference is that workplaces outside of prison have some safety oversight and with it, a higher standard of care. If prisons had to comply with OSHA standards, these injuries and deaths may have been prevented. Inmate injuries are worthy of even more preventive oversight when you consider that medical care can be substandard in many correctional facilities. The Georgia inmate who lost his leg initially sustained only a dime-sized cut above his ankle, but evidence in the lawsuit indicated that a lack of care worsened his injury to the point that he had to sacrifice a limb. Kara Fuelling, the saw mill worker, wasn’t brought to an emergency room but was rather transported to the prison infirmary. According to Fuelling’s lawsuit, a doctor who examined her was concerned about possible infection because the saw blade was dirty; she went on to develop an antibiotic-resistant MRSA infection. Many of these injuries are caused by equipment that, according to a report in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business and Employment Law, was known to be faulty or defective. Even when inmates are hurt because the correctional facility is negligent, there’s little to no recourse for incarcerated workers. | 11/23/21 |
ND- Sex Workers 1ACTournament: Scarsdale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Princeton ML | Judge: Sai CW for mentions of sexual violence Part 1: Start Talking ROJ and Dunt THE SEX WORK DISCUSSION HAS BEEN TABLED – it’s time to reopen it. IT’S NOT EVERY day you see sex workers from around the world meet in the mother of parliaments, but this autumn they arrived in their droves. They came from the Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Swe- den, Taiwan and Thailand, but they found a debate in the UK which was much more divisive and angry than any they had back home. The argument over sex worker rights in Britain has descended into a tit-for-tat battle of no-platforming, censorship and language policing. For years the debate around sex work was taboo because it just wasn’t something polite people talked about. Our manners are more open now. But it is threatening to become a subject that people are uncomfortable talk- ing about once again, because few people are foolish or confident enough to brave the howls of outrage which typify the way the debate is conducted. This autumn’s symposium was intended to sidestep that vitriolic public debate and collect evidence to be placed directly in the UK at its House of Commons Library as a reference for lawmakers. Sex workers shared their experiences and academics brought their research. The conclusion of both was that decriminalising sex work could protect prostitutes from violence. Something is changing in the prostitution debate. A recent decision by Amnesty Inter- national to support decriminalisation lent campaigners momentum and recognition, but it was merely the latest in a long list of respected international organisations – in- cluding the UN and the World Health Organisation – to demand change. Many sex workers believe it heralds a sea change in global attitudes. But the respectable political debate takes place against an angry backdrop of smears and abuse. There are ultimately two sex work debates: one, a calm and judicious assessment of evidence among international organisations, the other a censorious and puritanical shouting match between rival feminist factions. The body of emerging scholarship known as feminist theory, as rich and diverse as it is, is characterized by some basic tenets. First is the charge of androcentrism in mainstream scholarship--the charge that traditional scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women. Second is the charge of dualism. Dualism is the oppositional understanding of intuition, experience, and emotion as the inferior antitheses of logic, reason, and science, coupled with a tendency to equate women with the former grouping and men with the latter.3 A related dualism places men in the public domain-politics, law, paid work-and women in the private-home, absence of law, unpaid work.32 From these critiques of mainstream scholarship, feminists have derived two insights. The first is that the personal is political.33 By this it is meant that what happens in the daily lives of real people has political content in the same way as does what we normally think of as politics – the structure of economic systems and governments. That is, who makes breakfast, who gets a paycheck, who gets whistled at in the street – all the experiences of daily life are a part of the distribution of wealth and power in society. The second insight is that consciousness raising – collective focus on the particularities of real-life experience – is essential to truth-seeking. Thus, high probability impacts come before improbable extinction scenarios – we need to performatively invest in issues impacting marginalized groups by prioritizing discourse about violence that’s actually happening, not just imagined. Part 2: The Right to Refuse Duff et al Sex workers (abbreviated SWs) are facing exploitation beyond health risks – far beyond their work obligations. The social sciences literature has highlighted a broad range of everyday OHandS conditions, that may be of more immediate concern to SWs than sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV risk, which have largely been the focus of epidemiological research. Such occupational concerns include musculoskeletal disorders, violence and legal worries, the emotional burden of sex work, work-related stress and mental health issues 3. Mental health issues are high among SWs, with workplace factors, trauma and lifestyle suggested as contributors 5,6. For example, 74 of American SWs reported symptoms of serious mental illnesses, while 47 of Australian SWs met post-traumatic stress disorder criteria 5 and in Hong Kong, 26 of SWs reported suicidal ideation or attempts 6. The emotional burden of sex work can lead to stress and burnout 6,7. This literature also sheds light on the potential for OHandS processes to improve working conditions, and the health and safety of SWs. New Zealand's 2003 Prostitution Reform Act (PRA), which decriminalized sex work, vastly improved OHandS standards, workers' rights, as well as health and safety outcomes (e.g. reduced workplace violence, improved physical and sexual health) 2. In Sydney, Australia, the legalization of sex work has allowed OHandS agencies to regulate the work conditions of licensed work venues, resulting in higher OHandS standards, greater financial support and access to health outreach. However, while legalization has improved the OHandS standards of licensed brothels in Sydney, licensing schemes have reduced peer outreach services' access to unlicensed brothels. Say it with me . . . sex work is real work. In fact, sex work should be respected as a line of real work that has the possibility to be enjoyable, liberating, and a lucrative line of business. As a society, we tend to shut down around taboo topics like sex and prostitution, but as feminists, and in light of Women's History Month, it is crucial that we recognize sex workers as autonomous individuals. Sex work has typically developed the reputation as reinforcing unequal gender relations by promoting female victimization and objectification. While I am in no way invalidating female objectification and subjugation, I want to highlight that it is also imperative we recognize sex work as a potentially empowering and pleasurable line of work for those who choose to pursue it. Of course, it must be 100 percent consensual between two adults. Sex work can allow women to creatively express their sexuality and take pride in their occupation. Prostitution is not legal in the United States (which is an entirely different conversation), but the Netherlands and other European countries have legalized it. Under circumstances where sex work is legalized and safe, and where sex workers have legal rights and social benefits, sex work can allow women to creatively express their sexuality and take pride in their occupation. Sex worker Felcia (last names have been omitted for privacy), who has worked in the Red Light District of Amsterdam for almost 15 years now, told POPSUGAR that she "enjoys dressing up" for her clients, "finds pleasure and excitement" in her work, and "is made to feel attractive, desired, and worthy." Felcia also made clear that she has experienced "significant personal growth" in sex work and hopes that others will view her as an independent woman who is willingly choosing sex work as her occupation. Not only does Felcia find fulfillment and take pride in her work, but she is also able to financially support herself and her son. In the US, sex work is frequently deemed as dirty and immoral, but it is absolutely imperative that we break this narrative and recognize alternative possibilities. When the potential positive gains of sex work are completely disregarded and only the negative aspects are discussed, we run the risk of reinforcing the notion that sex workers are solely victims who should be ashamed. In 2021, I think we can all agree that female sexuality should be respected and appreciated, so instead of silencing and shaming women for their career choices, let's empower and support them. Sex work is criminalized throughout the United States, typically as misdemeanor offenses. Similar to the way the Unites States treats and criminalizes drug use, the policing of sex work exacerbates stigma, compromises access to resources, justifies violence, and is steeped in racial disparities. Women of color, especially Black cisgender and transgender women, girls, and femmes, are particularly vulnerable. Because sex work and sex trafficking are conflated, interventions are focused on abolishing the sex industry instead of eliminating structural issues that drive exploitation. From profiling to strip searches, from discarded condoms1 to forcible and extorted sex—law enforcement is a frequent perpetrator of violence against sex workers. As the Daniel Holtzclaw case in Oklahoma revealed, having a history of sex work and drug use increases vulnerability to police sexual violence. Black women, who are over policed, impoverished, and live in racially segregated communities, are marked as prime targets. Unfortunately, what the thirteen survivors in Oklahoma experienced is not an anomaly. Although sexual assault is grossly underreported, sexual violence is the second most reported form of police misconduct, after use of force. The DC Trans Coalition found that 23 of Black transgender people were physically or sexually assaulted by police because they were perceived to be transgender and involved in the sex trade. Another report, Meaningful Work, found that nearly 40 of Black and Black Multiracial transgender folks who have experience exchanging sex were subjected to pervasive harassment, violence, and arrest. When violence is committed against sex workers, police often refuse to investigate. In Los Angeles, Black sex workers were targeted for nearly three decades. Police officers responded by coding case files “No Human Involved.” Sex workers remain targeted and shamed, and Black women continue to feel the brunt of it—of the 41 sex workers murdered in the United States in 2015, 17 were Black and 12 were transgender women. Many workers close to the margins fear redundancy, and migrants fear losing the right to work as a result of Brexit. Low wages, benefits cuts and precarious jobs have pushed more of us into sex work. The response of the state has not been to reduce austerity but to crack down on sex workers. Police raid brothels, strip clubs and flats, confiscate earnings, threaten, arrest and deport us. They impose fines and prosecute those who work on the streets. Migrant sex workers are targeted as undesirable, held in detention centres and deported. On top of that, we are told we need to be rescued for our own good and are not believed when we speak out about actual cases of violence done to us. In the last year, strippers across the country have begun unionising their workplaces and taking on bosses and unfair exploitative conditions – and winning. We must fight with our own voices, under the (red) umbrella of labour and human rights. We strike against the idea that sex for money has to be policed and banned by the state in order to protect women. We come together to protest laws that punish us for trying to earn a living. We encourage sex workers across the globe to come together and create new ways of protesting, so that everyone can join the strike even if they can’t afford to take the day off. Lister Sex strikes bolster national support for sex workers causing tangible change – Colombia proves. Other sex strikes are successful because they drew media attention to the cause, rather than because men were being denied the occasional roll in the hay. In 2006, a group of Colombian women in the city of Pereira staged a sex strike to demand their gangster partners hand in their guns, stop shooting one another, and agree to attend vocational training programmes. Reports estimate there were about two dozen women taking part and the strike lasted for ten days. Clearly, a small group of women boycotting sex for 10 days is not going to affect cultural change on its own. There was much more going on. City authorities were already working with law enforcement to reduce gun crime, as one month before the strike, some 140,000 Pereirans had voted in favour of disarming civilians. The sex strike was symptomatic of a culture that desperately wanted change, rather than an instigator of it. The sex strike tactic drew global attention and boosted national support for their cause. By 2010, Pereira’s murder rate was reportedly down by 26.5 per cent, but this is a result of a city wide, concentrated effort to reduce gun crime that utilised a multi-agency approach and had international support, rather than a group of gangsters not getting any for ten days. Women have been striking for a long time, even if the American women’s movement has not been at the lead. Social change tactics like strikes or other forms of direct action have fallen out of mainstream feminist use, in favor of awareness-raising, calls to Congress, and the casting of a ballot every four years. “Our present situation is in some ways closer to the situation in 1908, when the first women’s strikes were led by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union,” wrote Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths, two of the strike organizers, in The Nation. “Was it a privilege for garment workers to strike then? Would it be a privilege for us to strike now?” As organizers met last month to plan actions for the March 8th strike, some American women writers, like Sady Doyle and Meghan Daum, claimed the strike would have relevance to only the most privileged of women. But such cautions, framed as gestures of inclusion, disregard the women who are already at the forefront of direct actions to demand dignity and rights: As part of the Fight for 15, as water protectors in North Dakota, in “Day Without an Immigrant” strikes, in the Movement for Black Lives. There is nothing new in demands for women to strike; it’s just that when women interrupt business as usual in support of labor rights—and to challenge xenophobia and white supremacy, at that—the women’s movement has not always considered those actions as taken in the name of “women’s rights”. Women’s Right to Refuse - Pacific Standard Striking is about breaking with routine and stopping everyday time. Such a break can also turn our attention to the past, to what women have risked before us. Out of a series of strikes and occupations, the international sex workers’ rights movement was born in the 1970s and ’80s, led by a group of women in Lyon, France. “We were at our wits end,” one said (in testimony available now in the radio documentary, La Revolte des Prostituees). “We were sick of going to jail, of being abused.” So they stopped work on June 2nd, 1975, and 150 of them—“the women prostitutes of Lyon,” they called themselves in a letter to the French president—occupied a church to demand police stop arresting them, fining them, jailing them, and separating them from their families and children. Their strike and occupation lasted 10 days, and they were joined by hundreds more sex workers across France, striking and occupying churches in solidarity. Though it has largely been forgotten as a landmark moment for women’s rights, that strike at the time made international headlines and sparked a movement of sex workers around the world. On March 8th, sex workers will strike again. “Women sex workers have been part of the ‘feminism of the 99’ since the very beginning of time,” declared the sex workers’ rights organizations Empower Foundation (Thailand) and English Collective of Prostitutes (United Kingdom). Sex workers are explicitly acknowledged as workers in the U.S. Women’s Strike platform (as they were, despite attempts to remove them, by the U.S. Women’s March). “For sex workers to strike recognizes sex work as work but our call goes further,” says Laura Watson from the English Collective of Prostitutes. “We are striking for the freedom to work and to not work in sex work. So we are striking against poverty, discrimination, and criminalization that institutionalizes us in sex work. We are striking against the low wages and exploitation in other jobs that means sex work is our best option. We are striking alongside other women because we are the same women—mothers, domestic workers, farm workers, factory workers—our struggles are the same.” Like other women workers in the service sector, particularly in the informal and criminalized economy, sex workers who will strike are far from “privileged.” As Watson explains, “sex work is often irregular and precarious with no sick pay, strike pay, or other benefits, which is why the strike call takes into consideration women’s circumstances. Some women will go on strike, others will charge double, others will take action for however long they can and in different ways—putting a broom outside their premises a symbol adopted by the U.K. women’s strike href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/wear-red-down-tools-and- buy-local-for-international-womens-day"; or joining the international call to wear black clothes, ribbon, a hat.” Shure AND legalizing sex work DOESN’T SOLVE THE AFF – the right to strike represents a unique form of activism. Clients may be hesitant to provide personal information for screening purposes, or expect to meet in secluded, dangerous areas to minimize the risk of being caught. Sex workers may worry about being evicted by landlords who don’t want to face charges of harboring brothels, making it more difficult to work together (and more safely) at home. Even in legalized and regulated jurisdictions like parts of the Netherlands and Nevada, harsh criminal penalties threaten those who work outside the sanctioned confines of legalized sex work, impacting those ineligible for work within legal brothels, such as people with criminal records, drug dependency, or HIV. Finally, immigration and border enforcement creates a situation where undocumented migrants incur large debts traveling abroad, are shut out of most workplaces, and face severe risks including detention and deportation. This power imbalance means not only that sex work is among the few limited options for undocumented migrants, but that they pay an extraordinarily high price when they’re snatched up the police. As such, these workers are particularly vulnerable to abuses by handlers, clients, and law enforcement. They add: Shure, Natalie. TV producer and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Pacific Standard, and elsewhere “Sex Workers’ Rights Are Workers’ Rights.” May 1, 2019. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/sex-workers-rights-are-workers-rights CH For Bailey, the solidarity on display in Washington Square Park last year evoked the events in 1975 that later gave International Whore’s Day its name and which activists pinpoint as the advent of the modern movement for sex workers’ rights. Hundreds of sex workers in Lyon, France occupied a network of churches to demand an end to the brutal criminalization of their livelihoods, railing against police harassment, anti-pimping statutes, and hotel closures that made it all but impossible to build stable, dignified lives. For eight days, sex workers across the country went on strike. That the sex worker-led actions in both 1975 and 2018 erupted as fierce protests against criminalization is no surprise, and as authors, activists, and sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith lay out in their new book Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, decriminalizing the sex trade is an essential demand made by people who sell sex throughout the world. Not only are carceral measures ineffective, they argue, but oppressive, further marginalizing and impoverishing the very people they pretend to protect. Justice won’t be found in locking up sex workers, ending demand for commercial sex, or “exiting” sex workers into low-wage jobs in sweat shops. It will come from these workers themselves building power to gain control over their working conditions, and challenging the broader political context that pushes many of them to sell sex in the first place. Mac and Smith provide a robust economic analysis of the sex trade, arguing that people sell sex for a very simple reason: they need money or resources, and sex work is the best option they have for getting it. If that sounds familiar, it should — it’s the same reason that anyone sells their labor to survive under capitalism. For higher-status workers, sex work is unlikely to be the most attractive professional option (although those for whom it is tend to advance the bourgeois “I choose to be an escort because it’s empowering!” argument that Mac and Smith skillfully push back against). Genuinely loving one’s job is a rare privilege, and most people do not. The year 1973 marked the founding of COYOTE, the first organization in the United States dedicated primarily to sex workers’ rights.21 Founded by former sex worker Margo St. James, COYOTE was one of the earliest examples of sex workers formally mobilizing as political agents. With a focus on state and police violence against sex workers, they sought to change both laws and social mores around sex work.22 COYOTE’s political demands in- cluded the decriminalization of sex work; they also provided legal, medical, and financial assistance to sex workers.23 The COYOTE advocacy newslet- ter, which ran from 1974 to 1979, highlighted both national and international events occurring in the nascent sex workers’ rights movement.24 The famous June, 1975 occupation of Saint-Nizier church by striking French sex workers in Lyon, France, was an international event that marked an important milestone in the early years of the sex workers’ rights movement and helped spark the movement in Europe. Like the previous decade’s uprisings at Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall, the French sex workers’ strike was largely driven by grievances regarding police violence.25 Inspired by the Lyon political action, French sex workers in Grenoble, Marseille, Montpellier, and Paris joined the protest and occupied churches in their cit- ies.26 The French sex workers’ strike presented sex workers as political actors capable of collectively organizing on a scale that could capture sustained international media attention. Out of the pandemic and protests, a new class consciousness has emerged. Leading the way in the labor rights movement is a group of workers who have for a long while gone unrecognized. Yet these workers are skilled in developing social bonds, creating engaging activism, and pointing out the ways in which the state seeks to oppress its citizens. Now able to work in the virtual space, sex workers are using their experience and well-honed skills to ignite awareness as well as action on crucial labor and feminist issues. Lena Chen, organizer of South by Southwest panel "No Justice, No Booty: Sex Work, Art, and Activism" and a sex worker and artist herself, finds that sex worker art and activism intersect quite a bit. "It's really about how do you use creative approaches to activism," she says, citing last year's Haymarket Pole Collective stripper strikes in response to local clubs' racist hiring practices. During their protest marches, the activists wore their strip club work clothes and also performed pole work. "You have something that is recognizable as a protest," Chen explains, "because it's a march, there are people chanting, there's movement in a public space. But then, at the same time, there's this other element of performance happening, entertainment." The founder of the HPC, Cat Hollis, is also a participant on the panel and will speak on how the strikes connect not just with workers' rights but also the racial justice movement. Another example of sex worker and labor union crossover is the group Cybertease, a virtual strip club organized by unionized workers. Their work has specifically blown up during the pandemic, when in-person club work is more precarious. Bringing the art of stripping online not only allows the group to continue to support themselves, but also to contribute to mutual aid funds of those most in need. Support from within the sex work community is crucial, Chen says, since sex work is often dangerously stigmatized, especially when undertaken by marginalized groups like people of color and queer people. "Those are the types of communities that have really fallen through the gaps, and haven't had access to government benefits like stimulus checks." A women’s strike is necessary. A women’s strike is impossible. In organising for a women’s strike, we want bring these contradictions into the foreground, to make them unignorable. On March 8th, we strike. The women’s strike builds solidarity across difference. We work to draw links between all the ways in which women’s work is exploited or taken for granted; all the ways in which resources and autonomy are withheld from us. That means naming work in all it’s forms: our work on shopfloors, our work cleaning offices, our work in brothels, our work in marriage, our work in care homes and our work caring for and raising the next generation of workers. It means the work we must put in to access healthcare – the work of resisting attacks on our reproductive autonomy; the work of accessing trans healthcare. It means the work we must put in to attempt to avoid criminalisation. It means naming our reproductive and domestic work as work alongside our work outside the home. In naming all this as work, we struggle together to make visible ‘all the work we do as women’ and to resist the exploitative conditions we are offered. We work to transform the conditions of our work and of our world. The women’s strike brings together organisers for reproductive justice, for the decriminalisation of sex work, for an end to violence against women; for worker’s rights and for trans healthcare. We demand bread, roses and hormones for all. We demand an end to racist border policing. Each of these struggles are bound up with the rest. Last year, the women’s strike shut down Soho to demand the decriminalisation of sex work. On the street, sex workers are criminalised for loitering and soliciting; they are issued with ‘section 21s’ and prostitute cautions, and their clients are criminalised for kerb-crawling. The effect of criminalisation is to push sex workers into the shadows, force them to rush negotiations with clients, and send a clear message to violent people that sex workers are ‘less important’ and in many ways treated by the state as ‘legitimate’ targets for violence. To make matters worse criminal records trap women in prostitution. Indoors, sex workers are criminalised for brothel-keeping if they work with a friend for safety, and the criminalisation of managers means sex workers are unable to access labour law. Sex workers are subject to aggressive immigration policing, and migrant sex workers are routinely deported. The women’s strike stands with sex workers in their demand for decriminalisation, safety and rights: the criminalisation of prostitution is key to how patriarchy denies all women their rights, by dividing us into categories of good and bad. We reject the violence and exploitation that is at the heart of global capitalism, imperialism and criminalisation. When we strike we connect these huge structures to the ‘small’, daily ways in which women’s lives are exploited and constrained. This March 8th, the women’s strike will once again shut down Soho in solidarity with sex workers: we will collectively refuse to work in order make both our labour and demands visible. | 11/13/21 |
SO-Womens Health 1ACTournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake ZD | Judge: Demarcus Powell ROJ and Northup Women are shut out of debates about their OWN health, and are treated as political pawns, NOT people. With the 40th anniversary this month of the historic Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade has come a steady stream of op-eds, features, and debates in the media—with many, like a recent cover story inTIME, taking the position that abortion rights supporters have been losing in terms of politics and public opinion. While I give these newspapers, magazines, and television shows credit for Roe the coverage it warrants, I take issue not only with the conclusion that we’re losers, but this whole way of framing the issue. The fact is that women’s fundamental human rights should never be treated as political spoils to be won or lost. And while pundits and politicians continue to do so, the real consequences of the steady erosion of legal protections since Roe are being felt sharply in the lives of millions of women nationwide. These consequences are being felt at the pharmacy counter, where women seeking emergency contraception get turned away if they can’t show proof of age. They’re being felt at the kitchen tables of women making tough decisions about how to pay for birth control when their employers refuse to cover it in their insurance plans. They’re being felt by the millions of women who live in the counties—87 percent of them nationwide—that do not have an abortion provider, leaving them to drive for hours to obtain a service that is not only legal, but constitutionally protected. And if the opponents of reproductive rights get their way and either overturn Roe or continue to choke off access to reproductive health care services, the consequences will be felt by countless women whose health and very lives will be endangered by their inability to obtain the safe, legal, and essential reproductive health care they need. The doomsayers in the media are correct at least on this point—that those hostile to women’s health and rights have been successful in chipping away at the protections that Roe once afforded. The result is a harsh reality in which women who live in states such as Mississippi, Texas, and others beset by rabid anti-choice lawmakers simply don’t have the same rights as women who live in New York and California. These politicians have set their sights on outlawing abortion at any cost, but when women’s doctors are bullied out of practice, women aren’t just robbed of access to safe and legal means of ending unintended pregnancies. They often lose their sole resource for a host of other basic health care services, including birth control, pregnancy care, annual exams, and cancer screenings. But that fact has been lost in the conversation we’re having right now. And if the debate continues to be confined to abortion and treated as a political game, we’ll never get to the heart of the matter. We need a national dialogue that moves beyond a continual tallying of who’s scoring what political points or who’s winning the political fight. We need to engage in careful, thoughtful, substantive discussions about the services necessary for women’s well-being throughout their lives: comprehensive sex education in our schools, domestic violence resources, affordable and reliable contraception, fertility treatments, affordable child care, safe pregnancy and maternal health care, and yes, abortion services. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote the Reclaiming of Educational Spaces, which means they must endorse our ability to use debate for critical discourse. ROB and Matsuda As educational oppression is rooted in ignorance, the Role of the Ballot is to Interrogate The Structural Manifestations of Patriarchal Violence. It’s time to specifically talk about women, since traditional pedagogy like util actively tells us to sit down and shut up. The body of emerging scholarship known as feminist theory, as rich and diverse as it is, is characterized by some basic tenets. First is the charge of androcentrism in mainstream scholarship--the charge that traditional scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women. Second is the charge of dualism. Dualism is the oppositional understanding of intuition, experience, and emotion as the inferior antitheses of logic, reason, and science, coupled with a tendency to equate women with the former grouping and men with the latter.3 A related dualism places men in the public domain-politics, law, paid work-and women in the private-home, absence of law, unpaid work.32 From these critiques of mainstream scholarship, feminists have derived two insights. The first is that the personal is political.33 By this it is meant that what happens in the daily lives of real people has political content in the same way as does what we normally think of as politics – the structure of economic systems and governments. That is, who makes breakfast, who gets a paycheck, who gets whistled at in the street – all the experiences of daily life are a part of the distribution of wealth and power in society. The second insight is that consciousness raising – collective focus on the particularities of real-life experience – is essential to truth-seeking. Particularly, contraceptives are essential medicines as they are necessary to curtail early and unwanted childbearing, and prevent unplanned pregnancies. This is especially where the pregnancy is damaging to the health, welfare and human development of the woman (WHO, 2017). Significantly, access to appropriate drugs and contraceptives, including emergency contraception, could prevent and control unsafe sex and even reduce vertical HIV transmission (Nanda et al., 2017; Perehudoff, Pizzarossa, and Stekelenburg, 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14).13 Accessing contraceptives can also prevent the termination of unwanted pregnancies and the option of unsafe abortion (MSF, 2019). Data reveals that unsafe abortion kills about 68,000 women every year, representing 13 of all pregnancy-related deaths (Grimes et al., 2006; WHO, 2002; WHO, 2004, p. 14). It is further estimated that 25 million unsafe abortions take place worldwide each year, majorly in developing countries (WHO, 2019). Following unsafe abortions, women may be vulnerable to a range of harms that affect their quality of life and well-being; they may suffer reproductive and genital tract infection and experience other health complications (WHO, 2004, p. 14). Some of these infections are fatal and serious, leading to infertility, disability and worse, death (Perehudoff et al., 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14). This is in addition to the social and financial costs to women, their families, the community at large and health care systems. There is therefore a need to improve access to contraceptives. A survey, however, estimated that many women who are at risk of unplanned or unintended pregnancy and would choose birth control using effective modern contraceptives are unable to do so (ICPD, 1995; Logez et al., 2011; WHO, 2004, 2017). Furthermore, reproductive and sexual health problems such as maternal, perinatal mortality and gynaecological health-related complications are said to be a significant disease burden for women of reproductive age (WHO, 2017, p. 11). Sexual and reproductive ill-health can lead to sexual dysfunction and other gynaecological conditions such as severe menstrual problems, urinary and faecal incontinence due to obstetric fistulae, uterine prolapse and pregnancy loss (Filippi et al., 2016, p. 6; Timilsina, 2018, pp. 18–19). This, in turn, leads to maternal and perinatal mortality. Women will, therefore, need access to medical interventions to prevent these avoidable health situations or treat theirrr conditions. For example, maternal health complications such as postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, can be prevented or treated by the appropriate use of essential medicines such as oxytocin and ergometrine injections; magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) injection for the prevention and treatment of severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia; ampicillin, gentamicin and metronidazole injections for the treatment of maternal sepsis; procaine benzylpenicillin, and ceftriaxone for neonatal sepsis (Tran and Bero, 2015). Access to the high quality, therapeutic medications in developing countries may not be adequate, resulting in a high number of preventable maternal deaths (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). Lack of access to Oxytocin in some sub-Saharan African countries and Tanzania has also been traced to institutional, socioeconomic, financial, cultural and political barriers (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). In 2019, a heat-stable carbetocin for the prevention of PPH was added to the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML; WHO, 2019a). This new formulation has similar effects to oxytocin, the current standard therapy, but offers a significant advantage for tropical countries as it does not require refrigeration for storage. Raltegravir is another medicine on the WHO's EML that is particularly important for pregnant women, as well as other contraceptives such as; levonorgestrel, an oral hormonal contraceptive, medroxyprogesterone acetate, an injectable hormonal contraceptive, progesterone vaginal ring, an intravaginal contraceptive and many others (WHO, 2019b). Injectable contraceptives are often preferred by women as they can be used discretely and conveniently to circumvent the factors aforementioned in Section 1.1.1. Studies, however, indicate that poor reproductive health and sexual health problems, including complications arising from early childbearing, HIV infection and STIs are significant disease burdens in developing countries and also, essential medicines and contraceptives for reproductive health are often not available to the majority of women who need them (Hall, 2005; The World Bank, 2001). In this respect, Hall (2005, pp. 32–34), made the observation that Mifepristone, a useful medicine for safe abortion, which can be self-administered to induce a discrete and noninvasive medical abortion up to 2 weeks of gestation is still prohibitive to most women wanting to access the drug. Some of these essential contraceptives, their compositions or methods may be impacted by patent-right restrictions as data indicates that contraceptives such as raltegravir, levonorgestrel, medroxyprogesterone acetate, process of extracting ergometrine, progesterone and the composition of carbetocin are more widely patented (Drug Patent Watch; European Patent Office; Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). This may be due in part to changes in national patent laws in many countries following the entry into force of the TRIPS Agreement, or the patenting practices of applicants (Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). Invariably, the inability to access better and high quality therapeutic treatments may mean that majority of women, particularly in developing countries, may be restricted to a limited choice of contraceptives. Because these patentable reproductive inventions have enabled reproductive choice and are often catalysts for reproductive rights, opposition to reproductive autonomy has translated into opposition to specific technologies. In turn, opposition has slowly begun to find its way into the patent laws that provide limited monopolies on reproductive inventions. Unlike inventions of antiquity, the advanced technology that now constitutes patent-eligible subject matter has the potential to tread on deeply moral, religious, and political ideologies. One commentator has noted that “as human existence becomes increasingly embedded in technology, the impact of traditionally patentable subject matter upon the exercise of individual liberties grows.”9 There is no area more fundamental to human existence than that of reproduction—an area that has recently experienced extraordinary technological advances. For example, in the last several decades, patents have been issued on technologies ranging from abortive methods, pharmaceuticals, and instruments, to in vitro fertilization (IVF),13 cloning (e.g., Dolly),14 and in vitro pre-implantation genetic diagnostic (PGD) procedures.15 Reproductive knowledge and capabilities have expanded in exponential ways, promising that the future holds even more technological advancements. Much of that practical knowledge is owned, or has the potential to be owned, as intellectual property. These “twenty-first century” technological developments, and the new perceived reproductive liberties that may accompany their growth,16 pose new challenges to a constitutionally empowered system of “promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts”17 with eighteenth-century origins. Whether or not the Framers contemplated the vast universe of procreative and reproductive developments as within the scope of traditionally patentable subject matter,18 the fact remains that as section 101 of the Patent Act19 currently stands, inventions related to human reproduction will routinely fall within its broad scope. It is likely, however, that the Framers did contemplate a patent system that would continue to provide broad and robust incentives to invent—a set of incentives that has helped establish the United States as a technological superpower and that many feel may be best left untouched. As currently configured, the patent system is susceptible to use by those opposed to reproductive rights—those who desire to prohibit access to reproductive and procreative technologies that directly bear on reproductive rights. Taken to its extreme, those who want to limit individuals’ ability to exercise their currently constitutionally protected rights or future constitutional rights, or desire to deny access to technologies on other moral bases, could obtain patent rights (by application, assignment, or license) on reproductive technologies and then enforce those governmentally granted property rights against any infringer. In other words, the same government that affords the rights to reproductive choices as found in the Constitution could be forced to grant limitations on the access to a private patentee’s reproductive technologies or inventions—regardless of societal value. With historical evidence of how a very important technology with the ability to dramatically change the landscape of reproductive rights was withheld by a company (under anti-abortion pressure, for example), it is not too difficult to imagine future technologies invoking a similar response. Since “the early stewards of our patent system never envisioned the prospect of public advocates anticipating objectionable activities, prosecuting patent applications, and being granted a proprietary interest in prohibitive regulation,”86 such future technologies now pose opportunities to manipulate the patent system to further private agendas. From that perspective, with the rapid pace of new inventions, and with the increased intermingling of technology with reproduction, not only will the constitutional right not to have a child be increasingly implicated, but the constitutional right to reproduce may also be brought back into the limelight. Since 2002, when Professor Thomas commented on abortion rights in relation to RU-486, technology has continued its ever-expanding course. In particular, technologies like IVF88—the process by which human egg cells are fertilized by sperm outside the body—in combination with the strides in understanding human gene sequences, have opened the door for scientists to develop many so-called PGD procedures. PGD procedures are currently used to test the embryos used in IVF for genetic defects, such as deafness, cystic fibrosis, and gender, but PGD also have the potential to be used for an increasingly diverse array of possible indicators with unknown ramifications on moral, religious, and socially acceptable behavior. As understanding of how human characteristics, like obesity, are linked to particular gene sequences increases, parents may be able to preselect growing numbers of characteristics of their offspring, raising the specter of “designer babies.”92 The “USPTO inevitably will grant patents on biological discoveries with such eugenic potential,”93 similar to the eugenic potential that was of concern in Skinner v. Oklahoma. 94 In that vein, “the same umbrella of rights that the Supreme Court has extended toward procreation and contraception could also be used to cover PGD and to protect a parent’s right to engage in genetic, as well as reproductive, choice.”95 In particular, and related to an issue on the minds of many American citizens given the media attention surrounding “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”96 and gay marriage, the possibility of linking homosexual orientation to a gene sequence is a real possibility. It would afford parents-to-be the ability to screen out embryos that show the indicators for homosexuality or, conversely, same-sex couples may select offspring with the indicators for homosexual orientation. In that regard, the idea of anticipatory patent blocking has already become an issue looming on the horizon. For example, Dr. Dean Hamer, a leading geneticist in the field of inheritable homosexuality, has published works indicating his desire to patent the “gay gene,” if discovered, and use patent rights to prohibit its use. Dr. Hamer has stated: I could try to use the law to withhold the “testing” technology, should it ever become available. Genetic testing as practiced in the United States requires commercialization, and commercialization generally requires protection of intellectual property through patents. If a lab does discover a “gay gene,” it might be able to control the licensing of the technology. Thus, I affirm: The sum total of the arguments and analysis indicates that human rights relate to health and that access to medicines is germane to the enjoyment of the right to health as well as the right to life. In this manner, human rights provide the basis to argue for the alleviation of problems inhibiting women's access to healthcare. This rights approach to the issue of accessing medicine is relevant because it provides a guiding standard for national policies, laws and programmes to achieve the goal of fulfilling, protecting, respecting and generally securing their right to health. To secure women's right to health and ensure that they can fully enjoy their human rights, it is submitted that there is a need to promote their access to affordable medicines. The article highlighted the concern that the patent protection of pharmaceuticals could result in high prices or stifle incremental innovation which could have the effect of impeding the availability of and women's access to affordable drugs for serious medical needs. In this event, one of the ways in which the state can meet its obligation, as to the right to health is to make sure that pharmaceutical patents do not constitute an obstruction to the enjoyment of the rights of women to adequate healthcare. The foregoing discussion also argued that pharmaceutical companies and patent owners can have a human right to health responsibility within the sphere of their business operations. This responsibility would pertain to the pricing of their drugs, testing and clinical trials, RandD, provision of safe and good quality medicines and the duty to ensure that their practices do not constitute an obstacle, especially to women's enjoyment of human rights and their right to medicines. Notwithstanding the obligations of pharmaceutical companies to the right to access medicines, states are ultimately the duty bearers accountable for the guarantees, and prevention of the violations of the rights to access medicines. It is their duty to monitor and also ensure that pharmaceutical firms do not impede the enjoyment of the right to health. In closing, the argument based on human rights principles is a consideration of women's health needs in regulations and policies to fulfil their demands of healthcare. Ultimately, if women's access to medicines is to be enhanced, the state must provide medicines and also guarantee the sustainable availability and accessibility of drugs through every avenue. Part 3: Mike 5 By reducing IPP, women in developing countries will see an increased access to generic medicine, which occurred prior to the instatement of TRIPS. 3.1.1 The TRIPS agreement: Patent rights access to medicines The Agreement is considered a determining factor in the challenge of access to medicines because it introduced the same minimum standard of patent rules for all WTO members to adopt and implement (Fisher and Syed, 2010, p. 183; Pogge, Rimmer, and Rubenstein, 2010, pp. 5–6; 't Hoen, 2009, p. 5). Thus the Agreement has added impetus to the concern that the patent protection of processes and products can restrict generic competition and raise the transaction cost of accessing medicines which, in turn, limits the ability of users to purchase the product at a competitive price (Aginam and Harrington, 2013, p. 2; Pogge, 2010, p. 137; Scherer and Watal, 2002; p. 914). The core concern is that patent rights in the TRIPS Agreement, to the extent that it has broadened and lengthened the scope of the protection thereby increasing the market power conferred by patents, is seen to contribute to the problem of accessibility (Sampath, 2004, p. 257). Before the establishment of TRIPS, some developing countries were able to avoid paying the high prices charged by pharmaceutical companies for purchasing branded medicines by acquiring the generic equivalents at a lower price from other countries whose patent laws did not cover pharmaceutical products, such as India ('t Hoen, 2009, pp. 5–6). These generic medicines had the advantage of being less expensive when compared to patented equivalents because they did not have all the risks and costs associated with RandD for manufacturing new medicines (Fink, 1999, p. 2). With the introduction of the TRIPS, however, generic reproduction or imitation of patented drugs amounts to infringement in all WTO member countries, unless produced under the safeguard and flexibilities in TRIPS or produced under licence from the patent holder (Sampath, 2004, p. 260). These structural conditions and mandate imposed by global patent law have reconfigured the landscape of countries that were prominent generic drug producers. For example, generic producing industries in Brazil and India had to conform to the mandatory 20 year term for product patents which was previously not part of their patent law (The World Bank, 2010, p. 113).42 With this new development, many developing countries who hitherto relied on cheaper generics from these countries for several reasons, including the inadequate or insufficient manufacturing capacity and expertise, raised the concern that patents for pharmaceuticals will affect the supply, availability and accessibility of the less expensive generics (Dhar and Gopakumar, 2009, p. 130). This is especially an issue where the patented versions are expensive and out of reach for poorer women. Internalized sexism is defined as the involuntary belief by females and females that the lies, stereotypes and myths about females and females that are delivered to everyone in a sexist society ARE TRUE. females and females, boys and men hear the sexist messages (lies and stereotypes) about females over their entire lifetimes. They hear that females are stupid, weak, passive, manipulative, with no capacity for intellectual pursuits or leadership. There are two logical, predictable consequences of a lifetime of such messages. First, boys / men will grow to believe many of the messages, and treat females accordingly. They will be thoroughly indoctrinated into their role in sexism, protecting their male privilege by colluding with the perpetuation of sexism. But there is a second logical consequence - the same messages also stick to females and females, resulting in internalized sexism / internalized misogyny. females and females are taught to act out the lies and stereotypes, doubting themselves and other non-males (sometimes called “horizontal hostility.”) This is the way females collude with the perpetuation of sexism. For the sexist system to be maintained and passed on to the next generation, we all must believe the messages (lies and stereotypes) to some degree, and collude with sexism by performing our assigned roles. Most progressive, non-profit organizations, whether in human services or social change, recognize that their mission cannot be completely fulfilled until all forms of oppression (racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism, et al) are addressed. Many of these same organizations, however, do not recognize the forms of internalized oppression that interfere with accomplishing their missions. females’s organizations, in particular, must take conscious action to recognize, acknowledge and interrupt internalized sexism / internalized misogyny as it affects individual females and the organization as a whole. This workshop encourages females to recognize and examine the harmful impact of a lifetime of sexist messages on their own self image, as well as their attitudes toward other females. Exercises and skills are offered to affirm females, females’s skills and to challenge internalized sexism, in our own lives, for females in our lives, and in our females’s organizations. Sample Objectives To provide a framework and common language for genuine dialogue about sexism and internalized sexism, and to create an environment which encourages such dialogue. Fix the Patent Laws – a coalition of over 40 patient advocacy groups and health-based civil society organisations – has written twice to the Presidency and the Department of Trade and Industry and Competition (DTIC) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight concerns with South Africa’s current IP system and the implications for COVID-19 vaccines and other medicines. The history of the battle for antiretrovirals to treat HIV has shown that patent regimes can either be crucial in realising the right to access healthcare and health products, or act as barriers to equitable, affordable access to medicines. As it stands, our patent system does not examine patent applications to determine whether they meet strong patentability criteria, and simply grant patents on application. This has resulted in many patents being unwarranted: some drugs under patent here are not patented anywhere else in the world. Our patent system allows ‘patent evergreening’ – where the period of patent protection is extended and keeps the prices of medicines artificially high for extended periods of time, which has limited access to life-saving medicines. Activists are adamant that government must reform our patent system. The coalition has urged the Presidency and DTIC to publish new legislation adhering to the recommendations of the Intellectual Property Policy Phase I which was adopted by Cabinet in 2018. This policy aligns with global public health policies and best practice, but the DTIC seems to drag its feet when with publishing new legislation. It is critical that Bills be published for public comment and expedited into law not only to strengthen South Africa’s efforts to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can reach all the people but importantly also to increase access to medicines generally at home. The South African government has acknowledged, through its joint-proposal at the WTO, that special measures are needed to facilitate access to medicines, prevent deaths and relieve pressure on the health system. But COVID-19 is not the only health crisis to which these measures should apply. While the patent waiver at the WTO is a bold move from the South African government for our country and others in the Global South, the waiver would only exist for the duration of the pandemic, and only in relation to COVID-19 medicines. Real patent law reform domestically would save lives in South Africa now and for years to come. Patent law reform could help to give cancer patients affordable and equitable access to medicines, people living with HIV greater access to second or third line antiretrovirals, increase the supply of contraceptives and push down the prices of drugs for drug-resistant tuberculosis. Not only is this possible, but it is a constitutional imperative. Over and above promoting the rights to equality, dignity and access to healthcare and medicines, new legislation would save lives, relieve pressure on healthcare workers and ease the strain on our public health system. And it cannot wait any longer. As global leaders are taking decisive steps to begin rebuilding many of the systems devastated in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have an opportunity and a responsibility to optimize this moment of reconstruction and address structural, gender-based disparities. The combination of long-standing inequities and pandemic-exacerbated conditions has clarified that sexual and reproductive health and rights are foundational and necessary for gender equality, as well as to a full recovery from the damage caused by COVID-19. What Is Feminist Foreign Policy? Traditionally, foreign policy has treated issues like gender equality as separate from and peripheral to core aims, such as promoting national security and trade. But a new and growing body of evidence illustrates how improving gender equality is in fact central to those aims, resulting in healthier and more prosperous societies. For example, equalizing women’s participation in the workforce with men could boost the global gross domestic product by $28 trillion annually and would benefit countries at all income levels. There is also evidence that gender equality is associated with peace and stability; the larger the differences between men and women’s experiences and opportunities in a given country, the more likely that country is to be involved in violent conflict. The first official recognition of gender equality as a global priority was in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, but it is only in the past decade that countries have begun to develop and adopt feminist foreign policies. This approach has evolved from tackling gender equality as just one of the many disparate aims of foreign policy, and instead applies a gender lens to every foreign policy decision, from aid allocations to political representation. It also acknowledges how gender inequality overlaps with other forms of oppression, such as racism and classism, and takes an intersectional approach to feminism. In this paper, access to medicines is identified as a fundamental human right to health, given that the right to health cannot be achieved without access to essential medicines for effective treatment of ailments and diseases. Health as a human right is enumerated in several human rights instruments. Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights identifies that: “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Article 12(1) makes provisions for the consideration and protection of women's right to health. In addition, health, and the importance of accessing essential medicines for adequate healthcare, are identified as significant to an adequate standard of living and connected to other human rights such as the rights to life, human dignity, education, development and the participation in civil and political life of society. Significantly, universal access to “quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all” is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 3) (WHOa; Perehudoff, Alexandrov, and Hogerzeil, 2019). In this respect, it is argued that human right is significant to the issue of access to medicines not only because it seeks to guarantee the moral and legal freedoms and entitlements of every individual, human rights also protect and promote the realisation of certain rights, such as the right to health, life and medicines—usually in relation to the responsibilities of states to uphold, guarantee and implement. In this vein, the article argues that the exercise and implementation of patent rights can raise human rights issues in the context of human health, life and access to essential and affordable life-saving pharmaceuticals. Thus, the design, interpretation and enforcement of patent rights should respond to the right to access medicines, as a component of the right to health and life. Essentially, human rights principles, norms and frameworks provide additional moral and humane support for the consideration of women's access to medicines, in view of the adverse effect of international and national patent law and the nature of the right conferred to inventors. Despite the success of Greenhill Debate, female debaters often leave the program. According to class rosters, there are currently only five females in the Advanced Debate class out of a total of 13 students. Of these five, there is only one active non-male senior debater. Many say this is due to the apparent sexist behavior in debate, not exclusively at Greenhill, but at tournaments as well. Before senior Brooke Bulmash’s first debate tournament her freshman year, Cindy Timmons, Director of Debate Aaron Timmons’ wife, who often helps at tournaments, sat her and the other females females down to discuss the way they should handle themselves during a tournament. They were told to hold their tongue and mind the volume of their voice, because trying to match boys’ behavior would paint them in a bad light. Whereas boys might be perceived as assertive, females are often perceived as ‘bossy,’ even if they are simply rising to the same level of aggression as their male opponents. Brooke said she soon realized why this conversation was important so early on in her debate career. Although the treatment of females in debate at Greenhill was fair and equal, the tournaments were a different story. “I was about to give the first constructive speech, and as I gave my opponents the flash-drive with my speech on it, and I was walking back to my computer I heard, ‘Debate Barbie,’ from the opposing boys which was very unsettling. That threw me off for the rest of the round and even the rest of the tournament,” Brooke said. According to Brooke, the incident made her realize the amount of criticism that females receive in debate. She said it’s not just the way females speak that is scrutinized, but also the way they dress. “There is a lot of scrutiny on the way you dress as a debater. females who wear high heels and a lot of makeup and not necessarily business attire are seen as less competitive,” Brooke said. Middle and Upper School Debate Coach Eric Forslund said that sexism isn’t exclusive to debate, but is an issue throughout competitive academic fields. “I think there are some pressures females face nationally. When they are involved in high-level academic events, there is pressure to not be associated with that. I’ve seen that quite a bit, there is more pressure to do things that are considered feminine,” Mr. Forslund said. Senior debater Grace Kuang said that there is pressure on the females to not make mistakes in class, as they risk losing credibility when they do. “It’s weird because a lot of the people there, especially guys, aren’t intentionally trying to be sexist. It’s like when you get a group of guys together who are really intelligent and who think they are really intelligent, there’s this group mentality that always happens where it feels like you’re consistently undermined, or if you speak up in class and give the wrong answer, there’s more loss of credibility when you do it than when they do it,” Grace said. Senior Shivani Daftary, who is still enrolled in the class but no longer debates competitively, said that this creates an exclusive atmosphere where females do not always feel comfortable. “I think females may be deterred from the activity because they might not want to be in a class that’s full of just guys. It’s kind of intimidating. The way that guys go about learning is different than females, and when you don’t have any other females on the team or only have one other girl, it can seem a little alienating. In a sense, it seems like, ‘Why am I doing this activity if I’m not treated in the same way, even if it may be unintentional or subconscious?’” Shivani said. Shivani said part of the reason she left competitive debate was because of the lack of female role models in the activity. “Partially it had to do with the fact that I had other commitments and I didn’t want to give up everything for debate, so I switched to public forum because it was less time intensive. But another portion of it was also the way that male coaches, not intentionally, but especially in the debate world, teach in general is very different than how a non-male might coach. They expect that you know something, and if you don’t, it’s guy mentality that they joke around about it,” Shivani said. Freshman Sophia Hurst, who is in the Introductory to Debate class, said that boys in her class form a camaraderie that excludes females. “The team dynamic is very masculine and very based on a male dynamic. It may not be sexist, but there is definitely exclusion throughout the debate community,” Sophia said. According to Director of Debate Aaron Timmons, Greenhill’s debate staff recognizes these issues and has had conversations about possible solutions. “Start with young females and allow them to have a voice. One of the things we have done in the last four to five years is develop a Lower School speech and debate club, and when they’re younger, we have the females debating mainly with females and the boys debating with boys. It’s to develop a sense of confidence and a sense of a voice that they may not have had,” Mr. Timmons said. Freshmen debater Esha Julka noted that it is up to the females in debate to serve as role models to other females who may be hesitating to join the team. “As females, it’s our responsibility to do so because the only way we are going to get females to stick with an activity that they love is to make sure they have someone there guiding the way,” Esha said. Mr. Timmons believes it’s also important to have non-male coaches. Shivani agrees, and believes that having non-male role models on the team would result in a higher retention rate for females. “There’s a difference between having two males coaches on the debate team and having non-male representation. Starting off freshman and sophomore year the class is pretty equal in terms of females and boys, but in terms of people you look up to, they’re all guys,” Shivani said. Currently, Greenhill Debate has two assistant non-male coaches. However, they do not spend much time with the team. Sophia and Esha think they should play a bigger role on the team. “They’re not really very involved, so it’s hard to tell what they’re like. They come to tournaments when the coaches can’t, and it’s hard to form a relationship with someone you don’t see very often,” Sophia said. Despite the issues that many females face in debate, there are females who thrive in the program and debate all four years of high school. “We’ve had over the last few years a robust number of females participate. Not only participate, but excel. They’re the ones who can not only put into words, but also have the motivation, the drive to navigate through some tough situations. Some of the best debaters we have had here have been females,” Mr. Timmons said. Last week, junior Shruthi Krishnan was named the top speaker and champion of the National Debate Coaches Associations National Championship event. She was thrilled to gain this status not only for herself, but for her team, saying that her role models were the strong Greenhill non-male debaters that came before her. “I was really excited to win top speaker and win the event because it’s a goal I’ve had ever since I joined Greenhill debate as a freshman. I would look up to all the people that had done Lincoln-Douglass debate before me like Rebecca Kuang a couple years ago and think, ‘That’s so cool, they won all these awards, I want to be successful like them,’” said Shruthi. “Some of my biggest role models and some of our most successful debaters have been non-male debaters, like Rebecca Kuang and Mitali Mathur.” Despite the program’s flaws, Grace said that it’s important for females to continue debate because of the value of the skills learned in the activity. “It is such a shame when a girl female quits debate because of a guy because it’s such a valuable activity,” said Grace. “It teaches females how to combat sexism in the real world and gives them those advocacy skills that will help them later on in life.” | 9/11/21 |
SO-Womens Health 1AC V2Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 4 | Opponent: Newman Smith VY | Judge: Harry Yu ROJ and Northup DEBATES ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS DANCE AROUND THE REAL ISSUES – from Texas abortion laws to birth control regulation, we’re treated as political pawns, NOT people. With the 40th anniversary this month of the historic Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade has come a steady stream of op-eds, features, and debates in the media—with many, like a recent cover story inTIME, taking the position that abortion rights supporters have been losing in terms of politics and public opinion. While I give these newspapers, magazines, and television shows credit for Roe the coverage it warrants, I take issue not only with the conclusion that we’re losers, but this whole way of framing the issue. The fact is that women’s fundamental human rights should never be treated as political spoils to be won or lost. And while pundits and politicians continue to do so, the real consequences of the steady erosion of legal protections since Roe are being felt sharply in the lives of millions of women nationwide. These consequences are being felt at the pharmacy counter, where women seeking emergency contraception get turned away if they can’t show proof of age. They’re being felt at the kitchen tables of women making tough decisions about how to pay for birth control when their employers refuse to cover it in their insurance plans. They’re being felt by the millions of women who live in the counties—87 percent of them nationwide—that do not have an abortion provider, leaving them to drive for hours to obtain a service that is not only legal, but constitutionally protected. And if the opponents of reproductive rights get their way and either overturn Roe or continue to choke off access to reproductive health care services, the consequences will be felt by countless women whose health and very lives will be endangered by their inability to obtain the safe, legal, and essential reproductive health care they need. The doomsayers in the media are correct at least on this point—that those hostile to women’s health and rights have been successful in chipping away at the protections that Roe once afforded. The result is a harsh reality in which women who live in states such as Mississippi, Texas, and others beset by rabid anti-choice lawmakers simply don’t have the same rights as women who live in New York and California. These politicians have set their sights on outlawing abortion at any cost, but when women’s doctors are bullied out of practice, women aren’t just robbed of access to safe and legal means of ending unintended pregnancies. They often lose their sole resource for a host of other basic health care services, including birth control, pregnancy care, annual exams, and cancer screenings. But that fact has been lost in the conversation we’re having right now. And if the debate continues to be confined to abortion and treated as a political game, we’ll never get to the heart of the matter. We need a national dialogue that moves beyond a continual tallying of who’s scoring what political points or who’s winning the political fight. We need to engage in careful, thoughtful, substantive discussions about the services necessary for women’s well-being throughout their lives: comprehensive sex education in our schools, domestic violence resources, affordable and reliable contraception, fertility treatments, affordable child care, safe pregnancy and maternal health care, and yes, abortion services. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote the Reclaiming of Educational Spaces, which means they must endorse our ability to use debate for critical discourse. The body of emerging scholarship known as feminist theory, as rich and diverse as it is, is characterized by some basic tenets. First is the charge of androcentrism in mainstream scholarship--the charge that traditional scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women. Second is the charge of dualism. Dualism is the oppositional understanding of intuition, experience, and emotion as the inferior antitheses of logic, reason, and science, coupled with a tendency to equate women with the former grouping and men with the latter.3 A related dualism places men in the public domain-politics, law, paid work-and women in the private-home, absence of law, unpaid work.32 From these critiques of mainstream scholarship, feminists have derived two insights. The first is that the personal is political.33 By this it is meant that what happens in the daily lives of real people has political content in the same way as does what we normally think of as politics – the structure of economic systems and governments. That is, who makes breakfast, who gets a paycheck, who gets whistled at in the street – all the experiences of daily life are a part of the distribution of wealth and power in society. The second insight is that consciousness raising – collective focus on the particularities of real-life experience – is essential to truth-seeking. Thus, high probability impacts come before improbable extinction scenarios – we need to performatively invest in issues impacting women by prioritizing discourse about violence that’s actually happening, not just imagined. Mike 1 It’s bad and getting worse – millions of unsafe abortions take place because TRIPS denies access to contraceptives. Particularly, contraceptives are essential medicines as they are necessary to curtail early and unwanted childbearing, and prevent unplanned pregnancies. This is especially where the pregnancy is damaging to the health, welfare and human development of the woman (WHO, 2017). Significantly, access to appropriate drugs and contraceptives, including emergency contraception, could prevent and control unsafe sex and even reduce vertical HIV transmission (Nanda et al., 2017; Perehudoff, Pizzarossa, and Stekelenburg, 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14).13 Accessing contraceptives can also prevent the termination of unwanted pregnancies and the option of unsafe abortion (MSF, 2019). Data reveals that unsafe abortion kills about 68,000 women every year, representing 13 of all pregnancy-related deaths (Grimes et al., 2006; WHO, 2002; WHO, 2004, p. 14). It is further estimated that 25 million unsafe abortions take place worldwide each year, majorly in developing countries (WHO, 2019). Following unsafe abortions, women may be vulnerable to a range of harms that affect their quality of life and well-being; they may suffer reproductive and genital tract infection and experience other health complications (WHO, 2004, p. 14). Some of these infections are fatal and serious, leading to infertility, disability and worse, death (Perehudoff et al., 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14). This is in addition to the social and financial costs to women, their families, the community at large and health care systems. There is therefore a need to improve access to contraceptives. A survey, however, estimated that many women who are at risk of unplanned or unintended pregnancy and would choose birth control using effective modern contraceptives are unable to do so (ICPD, 1995; Logez et al., 2011; WHO, 2004, 2017). Furthermore, reproductive and sexual health problems such as maternal, perinatal mortality and gynaecological health-related complications are said to be a significant disease burden for women of reproductive age (WHO, 2017, p. 11). Sexual and reproductive ill-health can lead to sexual dysfunction and other gynaecological conditions such as severe menstrual problems, urinary and faecal incontinence due to obstetric fistulae, uterine prolapse and pregnancy loss (Filippi et al., 2016, p. 6; Timilsina, 2018, pp. 18–19). This, in turn, leads to maternal and perinatal mortality. Women will, therefore, need access to medical interventions to prevent these avoidable health situations or treat theirrr conditions. For example, maternal health complications such as postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, can be prevented or treated by the appropriate use of essential medicines such as oxytocin and ergometrine injections; magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) injection for the prevention and treatment of severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia; ampicillin, gentamicin and metronidazole injections for the treatment of maternal sepsis; procaine benzylpenicillin, and ceftriaxone for neonatal sepsis (Tran and Bero, 2015). Access to the high quality, therapeutic medications in developing countries may not be adequate, resulting in a high number of preventable maternal deaths (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). Lack of access to Oxytocin in some sub-Saharan African countries and Tanzania has also been traced to institutional, socioeconomic, financial, cultural and political barriers (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). In 2019, a heat-stable carbetocin for the prevention of PPH was added to the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML; WHO, 2019a). This new formulation has similar effects to oxytocin, the current standard therapy, but offers a significant advantage for tropical countries as it does not require refrigeration for storage. Raltegravir is another medicine on the WHO's EML that is particularly important for pregnant women, as well as other contraceptives such as; levonorgestrel, an oral hormonal contraceptive, medroxyprogesterone acetate, an injectable hormonal contraceptive, progesterone vaginal ring, an intravaginal contraceptive and many others (WHO, 2019b). Injectable contraceptives are often preferred by women as they can be used discretely and conveniently to circumvent the factors aforementioned in Section 1.1.1. Studies, however, indicate that poor reproductive health and sexual health problems, including complications arising from early childbearing, HIV infection and STIs are significant disease burdens in developing countries and also, essential medicines and contraceptives for reproductive health are often not available to the majority of women who need them (Hall, 2005; The World Bank, 2001). In this respect, Hall (2005, pp. 32–34), made the observation that Mifepristone, a useful medicine for safe abortion, which can be self-administered to induce a discrete and noninvasive medical abortion up to 2 weeks of gestation is still prohibitive to most women wanting to access the drug. Some of these essential contraceptives, their compositions or methods may be impacted by patent-right restrictions as data indicates that contraceptives such as raltegravir, levonorgestrel, medroxyprogesterone acetate, process of extracting ergometrine, progesterone and the composition of carbetocin are more widely patented (Drug Patent Watch; European Patent Office; Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). This may be due in part to changes in national patent laws in many countries following the entry into force of the TRIPS Agreement, or the patenting practices of applicants (Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). Invariably, the inability to access better and high quality therapeutic treatments may mean that the majority of women, particularly in developing countries, may be restricted to a limited choice of contraceptives. Because these patentable reproductive inventions have enabled reproductive choice and are often catalysts for reproductive rights, opposition to reproductive autonomy has translated into opposition to specific technologies. In turn, opposition has slowly begun to find its way into the patent laws that provide limited monopolies on reproductive inventions. Unlike inventions of antiquity, the advanced technology that now constitutes patent-eligible subject matter has the potential to tread on deeply moral, religious, and political ideologies. One commentator has noted that “as human existence becomes increasingly embedded in technology, the impact of traditionally patentable subject matter upon the exercise of individual liberties grows.”9 There is no area more fundamental to human existence than that of reproduction—an area that has recently experienced extraordinary technological advances. For example, in the last several decades, patents have been issued on technologies ranging from abortive methods, pharmaceuticals, and instruments, to in vitro fertilization (IVF),13 cloning (e.g., Dolly),14 and in vitro pre-implantation genetic diagnostic (PGD) procedures.15 Reproductive knowledge and capabilities have expanded in exponential ways, promising that the future holds even more technological advancements. Much of that practical knowledge is owned, or has the potential to be owned, as intellectual property. These “twenty-first century” technological developments, and the new perceived reproductive liberties that may accompany their growth,16 pose new challenges to a constitutionally empowered system of “promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts”17 with eighteenth-century origins. Whether or not the Framers contemplated the vast universe of procreative and reproductive developments as within the scope of traditionally patentable subject matter,18 the fact remains that as section 101 of the Patent Act19 currently stands, inventions related to human reproduction will routinely fall within its broad scope. It is likely, however, that the Framers did contemplate a patent system that would continue to provide broad and robust incentives to invent—a set of incentives that has helped establish the United States as a technological superpower and that many feel may be best left untouched. As currently configured, the patent system is susceptible to use by those opposed to reproductive rights—those who desire to prohibit access to reproductive and procreative technologies that directly bear on reproductive rights. Taken to its extreme, those who want to limit individuals’ ability to exercise their currently constitutionally protected rights or future constitutional rights, or desire to deny access to technologies on other moral bases, could obtain patent rights (by application, assignment, or license) on reproductive technologies and then enforce those governmentally granted property rights against any infringer. In other words, the same government that affords the rights to reproductive choices as found in the Constitution could be forced to grant limitations on the access to a private patentee’s reproductive technologies or inventions—regardless of societal value. The sum total of the arguments and analysis indicates that human rights relate to health and that access to medicines is germane to the enjoyment of the right to health as well as the right to life. In this manner, human rights provide the basis to argue for the alleviation of problems inhibiting women's access to healthcare. This rights approach to the issue of accessing medicine is relevant because it provides a guiding standard for national policies, laws and programmes to achieve the goal of fulfilling, protecting, respecting and generally securing their right to health. To secure women's right to health and ensure that they can fully enjoy their human rights, it is submitted that there is a need to promote their access to affordable medicines. The article highlighted the concern that the patent protection of pharmaceuticals could result in high prices or stifle incremental innovation which could have the effect of impeding the availability of and women's access to affordable drugs for serious medical needs. In this event, one of the ways in which the state can meet its obligation, as to the right to health is to make sure that pharmaceutical patents do not constitute an obstruction to the enjoyment of the rights of women to adequate healthcare. The foregoing discussion also argued that pharmaceutical companies and patent owners can have a human right to health responsibility within the sphere of their business operations. This responsibility would pertain to the pricing of their drugs, testing and clinical trials, RandD, provision of safe and good quality medicines and the duty to ensure that their practices do not constitute an obstacle, especially to women's enjoyment of human rights and their right to medicines. Notwithstanding the obligations of pharmaceutical companies to the right to access medicines, states are ultimately the duty bearers accountable for the guarantees, and prevention of the violations of the rights to access medicines. It is their duty to monitor and also ensure that pharmaceutical firms do not impede the enjoyment of the right to health. In closing, the argument based on human rights principles is a consideration of women's health needs in regulations and policies to fulfil their demands of healthcare. Ultimately, if women's access to medicines is to be enhanced, the state must provide medicines and also guarantee the sustainable availability and accessibility of drugs through every avenue. Part 3: Mike 3 By reducing IPP, women in developing countries will see an increased access to generic medicine, which occurred prior to the instatement of TRIPS. 3.1.1 The TRIPS agreement: Patent rights access to medicines The Agreement is considered a determining factor in the challenge of access to medicines because it introduced the same minimum standard of patent rules for all WTO members to adopt and implement (Fisher and Syed, 2010, p. 183; Pogge, Rimmer, and Rubenstein, 2010, pp. 5–6; 't Hoen, 2009, p. 5). Thus the Agreement has added impetus to the concern that the patent protection of processes and products can restrict generic competition and raise the transaction cost of accessing medicines which, in turn, limits the ability of users to purchase the product at a competitive price (Aginam and Harrington, 2013, p. 2; Pogge, 2010, p. 137; Scherer and Watal, 2002; p. 914). The core concern is that patent rights in the TRIPS Agreement, to the extent that it has broadened and lengthened the scope of the protection thereby increasing the market power conferred by patents, is seen to contribute to the problem of accessibility (Sampath, 2004, p. 257). Before the establishment of TRIPS, some developing countries were able to avoid paying the high prices charged by pharmaceutical companies for purchasing branded medicines by acquiring the generic equivalents at a lower price from other countries whose patent laws did not cover pharmaceutical products, such as India ('t Hoen, 2009, pp. 5–6). These generic medicines had the advantage of being less expensive when compared to patented equivalents because they did not have all the risks and costs associated with RandD for manufacturing new medicines (Fink, 1999, p. 2). With the introduction of the TRIPS, however, generic reproduction or imitation of patented drugs amounts to infringement in all WTO member countries, unless produced under the safeguard and flexibilities in TRIPS or produced under licence from the patent holder (Sampath, 2004, p. 260). These structural conditions and mandate imposed by global patent law have reconfigured the landscape of countries that were prominent generic drug producers. For example, generic producing industries in Brazil and India had to conform to the mandatory 20 year term for product patents which was previously not part of their patent law (The World Bank, 2010, p. 113).42 With this new development, many developing countries who hitherto relied on cheaper generics from these countries for several reasons, including the inadequate or insufficient manufacturing capacity and expertise, raised the concern that patents for pharmaceuticals will affect the supply, availability and accessibility of the less expensive generics (Dhar and Gopakumar, 2009, p. 130). This is especially an issue where the patented versions are expensive and out of reach for poorer women. Fix the Patent Laws – a coalition of over 40 patient advocacy groups and health-based civil society organisations – has written twice to the Presidency and the Department of Trade and Industry and Competition (DTIC) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight concerns with South Africa’s current IP system and the implications for COVID-19 vaccines and other medicines. The history of the battle for antiretrovirals to treat HIV has shown that patent regimes can either be crucial in realising the right to access healthcare and health products, or act as barriers to equitable, affordable access to medicines. As it stands, our patent system does not examine patent applications to determine whether they meet strong patentability criteria, and simply grant patents on application. This has resulted in many patents being unwarranted: some drugs under patent here are not patented anywhere else in the world. Our patent system allows ‘patent evergreening’ – where the period of patent protection is extended and keeps the prices of medicines artificially high for extended periods of time, which has limited access to life-saving medicines. Activists are adamant that government must reform our patent system. The coalition has urged the Presidency and DTIC to publish new legislation adhering to the recommendations of the Intellectual Property Policy Phase I which was adopted by Cabinet in 2018. This policy aligns with global public health policies and best practice, but the DTIC seems to drag its feet when with publishing new legislation. It is critical that Bills be published for public comment and expedited into law not only to strengthen South Africa’s efforts to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can reach all the people but importantly also to increase access to medicines generally at home. The South African government has acknowledged, through its joint-proposal at the WTO, that special measures are needed to facilitate access to medicines, prevent deaths and relieve pressure on the health system. But COVID-19 is not the only health crisis to which these measures should apply. While the patent waiver at the WTO is a bold move from the South African government for our country and others in the Global South, the waiver would only exist for the duration of the pandemic, and only in relation to COVID-19 medicines. Real patent law reform domestically would save lives in South Africa now and for years to come. Patent law reform could help to give cancer patients affordable and equitable access to medicines, people living with HIV greater access to second or third line antiretrovirals, increase the supply of contraceptives and push down the prices of drugs for drug-resistant tuberculosis. Not only is this possible, but it is a constitutional imperative. Over and above promoting the rights to equality, dignity and access to healthcare and medicines, new legislation would save lives, relieve pressure on healthcare workers and ease the strain on our public health system. And it cannot wait any longer. As global leaders are taking decisive steps to begin rebuilding many of the systems devastated in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have an opportunity and a responsibility to optimize this moment of reconstruction and address structural, gender-based disparities. The combination of long-standing inequities and pandemic-exacerbated conditions has clarified that sexual and reproductive health and rights are foundational and necessary for gender equality, as well as to a full recovery from the damage caused by COVID-19. What Is Feminist Foreign Policy? Traditionally, foreign policy has treated issues like gender equality as separate from and peripheral to core aims, such as promoting national security and trade. But a new and growing body of evidence illustrates how improving gender equality is in fact central to those aims, resulting in healthier and more prosperous societies. For example, equalizing women’s participation in the workforce with men could boost the global gross domestic product by $28 trillion annually and would benefit countries at all income levels. There is also evidence that gender equality is associated with peace and stability; the larger the differences between men and women’s experiences and opportunities in a given country, the more likely that country is to be involved in violent conflict. The first official recognition of gender equality as a global priority was in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, but it is only in the past decade that countries have begun to develop and adopt feminist foreign policies. This approach has evolved from tackling gender equality as just one of the many disparate aims of foreign policy, and instead applies a gender lens to every foreign policy decision, from aid allocations to political representation. It also acknowledges how gender inequality overlaps with other forms of oppression, such as racism and classism, and takes an intersectional approach to feminism. In this paper, access to medicines is identified as a fundamental human right to health, given that the right to health cannot be achieved without access to essential medicines for effective treatment of ailments and diseases. Health as a human right is enumerated in several human rights instruments. Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights identifies that: “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Article 12(1) makes provisions for the consideration and protection of women's right to health. In addition, health, and the importance of accessing essential medicines for adequate healthcare, are identified as significant to an adequate standard of living and connected to other human rights such as the rights to life, human dignity, education, development and the participation in civil and political life of society. Significantly, universal access to “quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all” is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 3) (WHOa; Perehudoff, Alexandrov, and Hogerzeil, 2019). In this respect, it is argued that human right is significant to the issue of access to medicines not only because it seeks to guarantee the moral and legal freedoms and entitlements of every individual, human rights also protect and promote the realisation of certain rights, such as the right to health, life and medicines—usually in relation to the responsibilities of states to uphold, guarantee and implement. In this vein, the article argues that the exercise and implementation of patent rights can raise human rights issues in the context of human health, life and access to essential and affordable life-saving pharmaceuticals. Thus, the design, interpretation and enforcement of patent rights should respond to the right to access medicines, as a component of the right to health and life. Essentially, human rights principles, norms and frameworks provide additional moral and humane support for the consideration of women's access to medicines, in view of the adverse effect of international and national patent law and the nature of the right conferred to inventors. | 9/12/21 |
SO-Womens Health 1AC V3Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sage Hill MP | Judge: Varad Agarwala ROJ and Northup DEBATES ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS DANCE AROUND THE REAL ISSUES – from Texas abortion laws to birth control regulation, we’re treated as political pawns, NOT people. With the 40th anniversary this month of the historic Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade has come a steady stream of op-eds, features, and debates in the media—with many, like a recent cover story inTIME, taking the position that abortion rights supporters have been losing in terms of politics and public opinion. While I give these newspapers, magazines, and television shows credit for Roe the coverage it warrants, I take issue not only with the conclusion that we’re losers, but this whole way of framing the issue. The fact is that women’s fundamental human rights should never be treated as political spoils to be won or lost. And while pundits and politicians continue to do so, the real consequences of the steady erosion of legal protections since Roe are being felt sharply in the lives of millions of women nationwide. These consequences are being felt at the pharmacy counter, where women seeking emergency contraception get turned away if they can’t show proof of age. They’re being felt at the kitchen tables of women making tough decisions about how to pay for birth control when their employers refuse to cover it in their insurance plans. They’re being felt by the millions of women who live in the counties—87 percent of them nationwide—that do not have an abortion provider, leaving them to drive for hours to obtain a service that is not only legal, but constitutionally protected. And if the opponents of reproductive rights get their way and either overturn Roe or continue to choke off access to reproductive health care services, the consequences will be felt by countless women whose health and very lives will be endangered by their inability to obtain the safe, legal, and essential reproductive health care they need. The doomsayers in the media are correct at least on this point—that those hostile to women’s health and rights have been successful in chipping away at the protections that Roe once afforded. The result is a harsh reality in which women who live in states such as Mississippi, Texas, and others beset by rabid anti-choice lawmakers simply don’t have the same rights as women who live in New York and California. These politicians have set their sights on outlawing abortion at any cost, but when women’s doctors are bullied out of practice, women aren’t just robbed of access to safe and legal means of ending unintended pregnancies. They often lose their sole resource for a host of other basic health care services, including birth control, pregnancy care, annual exams, and cancer screenings. But that fact has been lost in the conversation we’re having right now. And if the debate continues to be confined to abortion and treated as a political game, we’ll never get to the heart of the matter. We need a national dialogue that moves beyond a continual tallying of who’s scoring what political points or who’s winning the political fight. We need to engage in careful, thoughtful, substantive discussions about the services necessary for women’s well-being throughout their lives: comprehensive sex education in our schools, domestic violence resources, affordable and reliable contraception, fertility treatments, affordable child care, safe pregnancy and maternal health care, and yes, abortion services. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote the Reclaiming of Educational Spaces, which means they must endorse our ability to use debate for critical discourse. The body of emerging scholarship known as feminist theory, as rich and diverse as it is, is characterized by some basic tenets. First is the charge of androcentrism in mainstream scholarship--the charge that traditional scholarly discourse largely ignores the lives and voices of women. Second is the charge of dualism. Dualism is the oppositional understanding of intuition, experience, and emotion as the inferior antitheses of logic, reason, and science, coupled with a tendency to equate women with the former grouping and men with the latter.3 A related dualism places men in the public domain-politics, law, paid work-and women in the private-home, absence of law, unpaid work.32 From these critiques of mainstream scholarship, feminists have derived two insights. The first is that the personal is political.33 By this it is meant that what happens in the daily lives of real people has political content in the same way as does what we normally think of as politics – the structure of economic systems and governments. That is, who makes breakfast, who gets a paycheck, who gets whistled at in the street – all the experiences of daily life are a part of the distribution of wealth and power in society. The second insight is that consciousness raising – collective focus on the particularities of real-life experience – is essential to truth-seeking. Thus, high probability impacts come before improbable extinction scenarios – we need to performatively invest in issues impacting women by prioritizing discourse about violence that’s actually happening, not just imagined. Mike 1 It’s bad and getting worse – millions of unsafe abortions take place because TRIPS denies access to contraceptives. Particularly, contraceptives are essential medicines as they are necessary to curtail early and unwanted childbearing, and prevent unplanned pregnancies. This is especially where the pregnancy is damaging to the health, welfare and human development of the woman (WHO, 2017). Significantly, access to appropriate drugs and contraceptives, including emergency contraception, could prevent and control unsafe sex and even reduce vertical HIV transmission (Nanda et al., 2017; Perehudoff, Pizzarossa, and Stekelenburg, 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14).13 Accessing contraceptives can also prevent the termination of unwanted pregnancies and the option of unsafe abortion (MSF, 2019). Data reveals that unsafe abortion kills about 68,000 women every year, representing 13 of all pregnancy-related deaths (Grimes et al., 2006; WHO, 2002; WHO, 2004, p. 14). It is further estimated that 25 million unsafe abortions take place worldwide each year, majorly in developing countries (WHO, 2019). Following unsafe abortions, women may be vulnerable to a range of harms that affect their quality of life and well-being; they may suffer reproductive and genital tract infection and experience other health complications (WHO, 2004, p. 14). Some of these infections are fatal and serious, leading to infertility, disability and worse, death (Perehudoff et al., 2018; WHO, 2004, p. 14). This is in addition to the social and financial costs to women, their families, the community at large and health care systems. There is therefore a need to improve access to contraceptives. A survey, however, estimated that many women who are at risk of unplanned or unintended pregnancy and would choose birth control using effective modern contraceptives are unable to do so (ICPD, 1995; Logez et al., 2011; WHO, 2004, 2017). Furthermore, reproductive and sexual health problems such as maternal, perinatal mortality and gynaecological health-related complications are said to be a significant disease burden for women of reproductive age (WHO, 2017, p. 11). Sexual and reproductive ill-health can lead to sexual dysfunction and other gynaecological conditions such as severe menstrual problems, urinary and faecal incontinence due to obstetric fistulae, uterine prolapse and pregnancy loss (Filippi et al., 2016, p. 6; Timilsina, 2018, pp. 18–19). This, in turn, leads to maternal and perinatal mortality. Women will, therefore, need access to medical interventions to prevent these avoidable health situations or treat theirrr conditions. For example, maternal health complications such as postpartum haemorrhage (PPH), pre-eclampsia and eclampsia, can be prevented or treated by the appropriate use of essential medicines such as oxytocin and ergometrine injections; magnesium sulfate (MgSO4) injection for the prevention and treatment of severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia; ampicillin, gentamicin and metronidazole injections for the treatment of maternal sepsis; procaine benzylpenicillin, and ceftriaxone for neonatal sepsis (Tran and Bero, 2015). Access to the high quality, therapeutic medications in developing countries may not be adequate, resulting in a high number of preventable maternal deaths (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). Lack of access to Oxytocin in some sub-Saharan African countries and Tanzania has also been traced to institutional, socioeconomic, financial, cultural and political barriers (Torloni et al., 2016, p. 645). In 2019, a heat-stable carbetocin for the prevention of PPH was added to the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML; WHO, 2019a). This new formulation has similar effects to oxytocin, the current standard therapy, but offers a significant advantage for tropical countries as it does not require refrigeration for storage. Raltegravir is another medicine on the WHO's EML that is particularly important for pregnant women, as well as other contraceptives such as; levonorgestrel, an oral hormonal contraceptive, medroxyprogesterone acetate, an injectable hormonal contraceptive, progesterone vaginal ring, an intravaginal contraceptive and many others (WHO, 2019b). Injectable contraceptives are often preferred by women as they can be used discretely and conveniently to circumvent the factors aforementioned in Section 1.1.1. Studies, however, indicate that poor reproductive health and sexual health problems, including complications arising from early childbearing, HIV infection and STIs are significant disease burdens in developing countries and also, essential medicines and contraceptives for reproductive health are often not available to the majority of women who need them (Hall, 2005; The World Bank, 2001). In this respect, Hall (2005, pp. 32–34), made the observation that Mifepristone, a useful medicine for safe abortion, which can be self-administered to induce a discrete and noninvasive medical abortion up to 2 weeks of gestation is still prohibitive to most women wanting to access the drug. Some of these essential contraceptives, their compositions or methods may be impacted by patent-right restrictions as data indicates that contraceptives such as raltegravir, levonorgestrel, medroxyprogesterone acetate, process of extracting ergometrine, progesterone and the composition of carbetocin are more widely patented (Drug Patent Watch; European Patent Office; Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). This may be due in part to changes in national patent laws in many countries following the entry into force of the TRIPS Agreement, or the patenting practices of applicants (Medicines Patent Pool, 2013, p. 11). Invariably, the inability to access better and high quality therapeutic treatments may mean that the majority of women, particularly in developing countries, may be restricted to a limited choice of contraceptives. Because these patentable reproductive inventions have enabled reproductive choice and are often catalysts for reproductive rights, opposition to reproductive autonomy has translated into opposition to specific technologies. In turn, opposition has slowly begun to find its way into the patent laws that provide limited monopolies on reproductive inventions. Unlike inventions of antiquity, the advanced technology that now constitutes patent-eligible subject matter has the potential to tread on deeply moral, religious, and political ideologies. One commentator has noted that “as human existence becomes increasingly embedded in technology, the impact of traditionally patentable subject matter upon the exercise of individual liberties grows.”9 There is no area more fundamental to human existence than that of reproduction—an area that has recently experienced extraordinary technological advances. For example, in the last several decades, patents have been issued on technologies ranging from abortive methods, pharmaceuticals, and instruments, to in vitro fertilization (IVF),13 cloning (e.g., Dolly),14 and in vitro pre-implantation genetic diagnostic (PGD) procedures.15 Reproductive knowledge and capabilities have expanded in exponential ways, promising that the future holds even more technological advancements. Much of that practical knowledge is owned, or has the potential to be owned, as intellectual property. These “twenty-first century” technological developments, and the new perceived reproductive liberties that may accompany their growth,16 pose new challenges to a constitutionally empowered system of “promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts”17 with eighteenth-century origins. Whether or not the Framers contemplated the vast universe of procreative and reproductive developments as within the scope of traditionally patentable subject matter,18 the fact remains that as section 101 of the Patent Act19 currently stands, inventions related to human reproduction will routinely fall within its broad scope. It is likely, however, that the Framers did contemplate a patent system that would continue to provide broad and robust incentives to invent—a set of incentives that has helped establish the United States as a technological superpower and that many feel may be best left untouched. As currently configured, the patent system is susceptible to use by those opposed to reproductive rights—those who desire to prohibit access to reproductive and procreative technologies that directly bear on reproductive rights. Taken to its extreme, those who want to limit individuals’ ability to exercise their currently constitutionally protected rights or future constitutional rights, or desire to deny access to technologies on other moral bases, could obtain patent rights (by application, assignment, or license) on reproductive technologies and then enforce those governmentally granted property rights against any infringer. In other words, the same government that affords the rights to reproductive choices as found in the Constitution could be forced to grant limitations on the access to a private patentee’s reproductive technologies or inventions—regardless of societal value. The patenting of the human gene in the U.S. case of Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics Inc illustrates this point. The dispute was over the validity of Myriad's patents for the discovery of the location and sequencing of BRCA116 and BRCA2 genes relating to breast and ovarian cancer (Tripathi, Parnami, and Pati, 2009, p. 250). Myriad had successfully isolated the DNA sequences and methods to diagnose a propensity for cancer which, in turn, enabled the company to conduct tests for the detection of the mutation and methods to identify drugs using isolated DNA sequences. The patents by Myriad gave it exclusive rights to isolate an individual's BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, synthetically create BRCA complementary DNA (cDNA) and conduct the mutation test. Because of the exclusive right, Myriad charged up to US$250–US$500 to screen for the occurrence of the mutation (Kane, 2007, p. 329; Li, 2007, p. 374; Williams-Jones, 2006, p. 136).18 Myriad's monopoly enabled it to own patent testing which could only take place in their labs and control the test process, which also deprived women of other cheaper alternatives. Myriad also challenged the test offered by other labs without its licence or and where a licence was given, strict conditions were attached to it (Kane, 2007, p. 329; Williams-Jones, 2006, p. 136).20 The patent effectively limited other researchers from researching into other treatments and medicines for women using the process, thereby stifling incremental innovation. In the case before the U.S. Courts, the petitioners argued that the patents were essentially a monopoly over the laws of nature and approached the court to invalidate the patents on the grounds of 35 U. S. C. §101. On June 13, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ruled that Myriad's patents for naturally occurring DNA segments was a monopoly for a product of nature and, therefore, invalid for patent protection even if it has been isolated from nature (Opinion of the Court, pp. 8–18).21 Delivering the majority judgement, Justice Clarence Thomas said: Had Myriad created an innovative method of manipulating genes while searching for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, it could possibly have sought a method patent. But the processes used by Myriad to isolate DNA were well understood by geneticists at the time of Myriad's patents “were well understood, widely used, and fairly uniform insofar as any scientist engaged in the search for a gene would likely have utilized a similar approach, …” (Opinion of the Court, p. 17). However, the court held the cDNA patent was eligible because it is not naturally occurring (Opinion of the Court, pp. 10–18).22 This case demonstrates the importance of ensuring that the patent does not limit RandD and access to medicines. The excessive price of, lenalidomide, a lifesaving medicine to treat multiple myeloma—a blood cancer of the plasma cells of bone marrow and myelodysplastic syndromes in South Africa is another example of the issue of unaffordable cancer medicines due to the exclusivity and monopoly right of the patent. As a result of the patented drug, sold under the trade name Revlimid, its generic, which is considerably cheaper, is not available in the country (Health Global Access Project, 2019; 't Hoen et al., 2009, p. 1052–1053). Until 2016, many patients were able to obtain drugs from other countries at a fraction of the current price.23 Patients in the private and public sector had the advantage of accessing high quality, effective and safe generics from India under a Section 21 Authorisation. Currently, however, Celgene has the exclusive right to 32 secondary patents on lenalidomide that invariably blocks generic competition until 2026—30 years after the primary patent on lenalidomide was granted.24 Although the generic version of the drug is available in India at an estimated cost that is 95 less than the price of the South African originator product, the people and public health authorities are unable to purchase the more affordable generic due to the patent on the drug in South Africa. For women, particularly the financially disadvantaged, this excessively priced medicines due to patent not only limit access, it leads to poorer health outcomes and also puts an enormous constraint on those with an already cash-strapped budget. The sum total of the arguments and analysis indicates that human rights relate to health and that access to medicines is germane to the enjoyment of the right to health as well as the right to life. In this manner, human rights provide the basis to argue for the alleviation of problems inhibiting women's access to healthcare. This rights approach to the issue of accessing medicine is relevant because it provides a guiding standard for national policies, laws and programmes to achieve the goal of fulfilling, protecting, respecting and generally securing their right to health. To secure women's right to health and ensure that they can fully enjoy their human rights, it is submitted that there is a need to promote their access to affordable medicines. The article highlighted the concern that the patent protection of pharmaceuticals could result in high prices or stifle incremental innovation which could have the effect of impeding the availability of and women's access to affordable drugs for serious medical needs. In this event, one of the ways in which the state can meet its obligation, as to the right to health is to make sure that pharmaceutical patents do not constitute an obstruction to the enjoyment of the rights of women to adequate healthcare. The foregoing discussion also argued that pharmaceutical companies and patent owners can have a human right to health responsibility within the sphere of their business operations. This responsibility would pertain to the pricing of their drugs, testing and clinical trials, RandD, provision of safe and good quality medicines and the duty to ensure that their practices do not constitute an obstacle, especially to women's enjoyment of human rights and their right to medicines. Notwithstanding the obligations of pharmaceutical companies to the right to access medicines, states are ultimately the duty bearers accountable for the guarantees, and prevention of the violations of the rights to access medicines. It is their duty to monitor and also ensure that pharmaceutical firms do not impede the enjoyment of the right to health. In closing, the argument based on human rights principles is a consideration of women's health needs in regulations and policies to fulfil their demands of healthcare. Ultimately, if women's access to medicines is to be enhanced, the state must provide medicines and also guarantee the sustainable availability and accessibility of drugs through every avenue. Part 3: Mike 5 By reducing IPP, women in developing countries will see an increased access to generic medicine, which occurred prior to the instatement of TRIPS. 3.1.1 The TRIPS agreement: Patent rights access to medicines The Agreement is considered a determining factor in the challenge of access to medicines because it introduced the same minimum standard of patent rules for all WTO members to adopt and implement (Fisher and Syed, 2010, p. 183; Pogge, Rimmer, and Rubenstein, 2010, pp. 5–6; 't Hoen, 2009, p. 5). Thus the Agreement has added impetus to the concern that the patent protection of processes and products can restrict generic competition and raise the transaction cost of accessing medicines which, in turn, limits the ability of users to purchase the product at a competitive price (Aginam and Harrington, 2013, p. 2; Pogge, 2010, p. 137; Scherer and Watal, 2002; p. 914). The core concern is that patent rights in the TRIPS Agreement, to the extent that it has broadened and lengthened the scope of the protection thereby increasing the market power conferred by patents, is seen to contribute to the problem of accessibility (Sampath, 2004, p. 257). Before the establishment of TRIPS, some developing countries were able to avoid paying the high prices charged by pharmaceutical companies for purchasing branded medicines by acquiring the generic equivalents at a lower price from other countries whose patent laws did not cover pharmaceutical products, such as India ('t Hoen, 2009, pp. 5–6). These generic medicines had the advantage of being less expensive when compared to patented equivalents because they did not have all the risks and costs associated with RandD for manufacturing new medicines (Fink, 1999, p. 2). With the introduction of the TRIPS, however, generic reproduction or imitation of patented drugs amounts to infringement in all WTO member countries, unless produced under the safeguard and flexibilities in TRIPS or produced under licence from the patent holder (Sampath, 2004, p. 260). These structural conditions and mandate imposed by global patent law have reconfigured the landscape of countries that were prominent generic drug producers. For example, generic producing industries in Brazil and India had to conform to the mandatory 20 year term for product patents which was previously not part of their patent law (The World Bank, 2010, p. 113).42 With this new development, many developing countries who hitherto relied on cheaper generics from these countries for several reasons, including the inadequate or insufficient manufacturing capacity and expertise, raised the concern that patents for pharmaceuticals will affect the supply, availability and accessibility of the less expensive generics (Dhar and Gopakumar, 2009, p. 130). This is especially an issue where the patented versions are expensive and out of reach for poorer women. Fix the Patent Laws – a coalition of over 40 patient advocacy groups and health-based civil society organisations – has written twice to the Presidency and the Department of Trade and Industry and Competition (DTIC) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight concerns with South Africa’s current IP system and the implications for COVID-19 vaccines and other medicines. The history of the battle for antiretrovirals to treat HIV has shown that patent regimes can either be crucial in realising the right to access healthcare and health products, or act as barriers to equitable, affordable access to medicines. As it stands, our patent system does not examine patent applications to determine whether they meet strong patentability criteria, and simply grant patents on application. This has resulted in many patents being unwarranted: some drugs under patent here are not patented anywhere else in the world. Our patent system allows ‘patent evergreening’ – where the period of patent protection is extended and keeps the prices of medicines artificially high for extended periods of time, which has limited access to life-saving medicines. Activists are adamant that government must reform our patent system. The coalition has urged the Presidency and DTIC to publish new legislation adhering to the recommendations of the Intellectual Property Policy Phase I which was adopted by Cabinet in 2018. This policy aligns with global public health policies and best practice, but the DTIC seems to drag its feet when with publishing new legislation. It is critical that Bills be published for public comment and expedited into law not only to strengthen South Africa’s efforts to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines and treatments can reach all the people but importantly also to increase access to medicines generally at home. The South African government has acknowledged, through its joint-proposal at the WTO, that special measures are needed to facilitate access to medicines, prevent deaths and relieve pressure on the health system. But COVID-19 is not the only health crisis to which these measures should apply. While the patent waiver at the WTO is a bold move from the South African government for our country and others in the Global South, the waiver would only exist for the duration of the pandemic, and only in relation to COVID-19 medicines. Real patent law reform domestically would save lives in South Africa now and for years to come. Patent law reform could help to give cancer patients affordable and equitable access to medicines, people living with HIV greater access to second or third line antiretrovirals, increase the supply of contraceptives and push down the prices of drugs for drug-resistant tuberculosis. Not only is this possible, but it is a constitutional imperative. Over and above promoting the rights to equality, dignity and access to healthcare and medicines, new legislation would save lives, relieve pressure on healthcare workers and ease the strain on our public health system. And it cannot wait any longer. As global leaders are taking decisive steps to begin rebuilding many of the systems devastated in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have an opportunity and a responsibility to optimize this moment of reconstruction and address structural, gender-based disparities. The combination of long-standing inequities and pandemic-exacerbated conditions has clarified that sexual and reproductive health and rights are foundational and necessary for gender equality, as well as to a full recovery from the damage caused by COVID-19. What Is Feminist Foreign Policy? Traditionally, foreign policy has treated issues like gender equality as separate from and peripheral to core aims, such as promoting national security and trade. But a new and growing body of evidence illustrates how improving gender equality is in fact central to those aims, resulting in healthier and more prosperous societies. For example, equalizing women’s participation in the workforce with men could boost the global gross domestic product by $28 trillion annually and would benefit countries at all income levels. There is also evidence that gender equality is associated with peace and stability; the larger the differences between men and women’s experiences and opportunities in a given country, the more likely that country is to be involved in violent conflict. The first official recognition of gender equality as a global priority was in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, but it is only in the past decade that countries have begun to develop and adopt feminist foreign policies. This approach has evolved from tackling gender equality as just one of the many disparate aims of foreign policy, and instead applies a gender lens to every foreign policy decision, from aid allocations to political representation. It also acknowledges how gender inequality overlaps with other forms of oppression, such as racism and classism, and takes an intersectional approach to feminism. Cultural theorist Ruth McElroy suggests, “Women’s belonging to nations is indissoluble from their reproductive biology” (325). For all that motherhood may be conceived as a private choice occurring in the supposedly private sphere, reproduction and motherhood are nonetheless public and political as well, and thoroughly entangled with women’s status as members of their nation. By virtue of their reproduction (or even lack thereof!), women can be constructed in cultural narratives and political scripts as contributors to society or threats to the national good, caretakers of the future who merit protection and support or wayward parents who must be disciplined back into the national fold, national maternal ideals or outsiders within. The state’s identification of and response to women as reproducers reflects the continuous processes of the politics of belonging, which “involve not only the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers...but also by their contestation, challenge and resistance by other political agents” (Yuval-Davis 20). We see these politics of belonging manifested not only discursively, but also in the policies and laws that protect or privilege some mothers and not others, some children, but not all. When anthropologists Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp ask, “who defines the body of the nation into which the next generation is recruited? Who is considered to be in that national body, who is out of it?” (3), therefore, there is no one answer; rather, this is the question perpetually being asked and answered by political discourse and practice infused with the logic of futurity. The hopes and fears of the present political moment and the imaginative desires for the future are thus continually projected upon the bodies of women and their procreative capacities. Futurity, I suggest in this project, as a possibly inevitable perspective or worldview, allows for the state to focus on women as reproductive beings in a way that it does not for men. Following from Foucault’s explication of biopower, the modern state takes an interest in the workings and ostensible health of its populations, creating new knowledges and indices for the normal as it counts up the characteristics of its citizenry and sets goals for demographic management. While Foucault tends not to focus on the reproductive elements of the state’s biopolitical interest—for instance, the setting of ideal rates of fertility, health expectations for women and children, creation of access to the medical, economic, and social resources needed for reproduction—these are, I would argue, operations of the state that have potential for tremendous impacts upon women particularly. The other biopolitical interests of the state—appropriate number of workers, manageable immigration rates, proper ratio of elderly to young, and so on—are also all implicated in the procreative behaviors of women, which would seem to intensify the state’s interest in them. Brought into the broader framework of women’s political status and national belonging, reproduction in this context seems poised to function as an axis upon which the dispensation of women’s citizenship can pivot, with particular regard to her racial, economic, and social demographic and the state’s assessment of her (and her children’s) value to the national future. Penelope Deutscher suggests that through the emergence of biopower: Women would later assume a status as a reproductive threshold of the future and health of nations, populations and peoples. But the condition for this role for women and maternal reproductivity was the very possibility of reproduction being associated with a shifting field of possible substances, telos, outcomes and obligations: the overall good, the general happiness, the future of the nation, the health of the nation, the competitiveness of the nation, the future of the people, individual flourishing or freedom, individual rights, domestic happiness, the family unit as building block of the nation, the transmission of the bloodline, the family name, transmission of property or family or genealogical transmission, reproduction of the labour force, etc. That reproduction be plausibly thought of in such terms at all was a precondition of it becoming associated with women’s role as threshold of futurity. (Deutscher 129) The state’s biopolitical management of women’s reproduction may thus allow it to approach women primarily as reproductive beings, an essentalist or even utilitarian collapse that may make it easier to intervene upon their bodies and perhaps reflects a deeply ingrained discomfort with the notion that women have tremendous potential power to impact the composition of the future. In this project, I am proposing a framework of futurity that is in operation, characterized by discursive and eugenic aspects, that uses women as the vehicle for future world-building and nation-making. This futurity aims to enact particular visions of the future via changes in the present, particularly through the management of women’s reproduction in the present such that the future population comports with present desires. When this futurity framework is picked up by the state in its various capacities, I suggest there are significant consequences for women’s citizenship as women because they are so intrinsically linked in the cultural and political imaginary with reproduction. In the process of grappling with these concepts, this project asks how the logic of futurity functions to organize the terms of women’s social or political belonging in reproductive terms. How does the state pick up and extend this logic to women, and how might that impact the meaningfulness of women’s citizenship or national belonging? Does the logic of futurity, the constant pressure of the forward vision combined with the imaginative limitations of the present, insist upon women’s citizenship being or becoming something fundamentally different from men’s by virtue of reproductive capacity and association? Exploring these questions brings this project into several disciplinary contexts, including feminist theory and philosophy, political theory, disability theory (eugenics), and even the sphere of economics. In connecting these concepts to ongoing conversations about women and citizenship in the contemporary United States, this project is ultimately working to tie together disparate fields and illuminate how they interact with respect to a model of futurity that I theorize as containing discursive and eugenic aspects. It may be that state-based discourses and practices related to women’s reproduction and citizenship are not so much causes as they are effects of the logic of futurity. | 9/19/21 |
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