Harrison Blaustein Aff
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Apple Valley | 1 | Harker AS | Claudia Ribera |
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| Apple Valley | 4 | Walt Whitman EY | Silma Bathily |
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| Columbia | 2 | Lexington TG | Bennet Fees |
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| Grapevine | 3 | Lake Highland Prep NP | Andrew Torrez |
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| Grapevine | Triples | Dulles VN | Andrew Torrez |
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| Grapevine | 2 | Isidore Newman EE | Jyleesa Hampton |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Harvard | 2 | Walt Whitman HZ | Kattichka Cazeau |
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| Princeton | Quarters | Lexington JB | Albert Kang, Zachary Siegel Sreeta Basu |
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| UPenn | 5 | Bergen County Academies AK | Amelia Ritenour |
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| Yale | 2 | Lake Highland Prep AV | Katy Stenner |
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| Yale | 1 | all | all |
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| all | 1 | all | all |
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| all | 1 | all | all |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Apple Valley | 1 | Opponent: Harker AS | Judge: Claudia Ribera AC - AC |
| Apple Valley | 4 | Opponent: Walt Whitman EY | Judge: Silma Bathily AC - Stock AC |
| Columbia | 2 | Opponent: Lexington TG | Judge: Bennet Fees AC - Lobbying AC |
| Grapevine | 3 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep NP | Judge: Andrew Torrez AC |
| Grapevine | Triples | Opponent: Dulles VN | Judge: Andrew Torrez AC - AC |
| Grapevine | 2 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Jyleesa Hampton AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau AC - AC |
| Princeton | Quarters | Opponent: Lexington JB | Judge: Albert Kang, Zachary Siegel Sreeta Basu AC - Fem |
| UPenn | 5 | Opponent: Bergen County Academies AK | Judge: Amelia Ritenour AC - AC |
| Yale | 2 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AV | Judge: Katy Stenner AC- AC |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
| Entry | Date |
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0 - Contact InfoTournament: all | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all 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 - Ethnofuturism ACTournament: UPenn | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bergen County Academies AK | Judge: Amelia Ritenour ‘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 Giroux 1 CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER EDUCATION – we desperately need critical pedagogy to resist that. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means helping students develop the skills to question the squo. 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 PROFIT OVER PEOPLE – capitalism values space only if people can make money from it. 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 implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood. Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements invented, and the same end product organizes the work process itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-operation, the number of assistants, etc. During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else. The same standards of means and end apply to the product itself. Though it is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and is the end of the fabrication process, it never becomes, so to speak, an end in itself, at least not as long as it remains an object for use. The chair which is the end of carpentering can show its usefulness only by again becoming a means, either as a thing whose durability permits its use as a means for comfortable living or as a means of exchange. The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.19 This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen-— like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness. Within the category of means and end, and among the experiences of instrumentality which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is "an end in itself." 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). Advocacy Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. 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. Part 3: It’s Easy if You Try
Jones 5 THE PRESENT ISN’T THE FUTURE – reimaginations are possible. The figure above is an instance of Indigenous EF, representing a challenge to Eurocentric futurity through art. Such forms of EF disrupt dominant, one-dimensional narratives about how space ought to be. 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 Ethnofuturism 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. E 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. 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 interprets 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 inhabitants of the region, in solution of ethical challenges”. “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 “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 | 2/21/22 |
JF - Ethnofuturism AC v2Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Walt Whitman HZ | Judge: Kattichka Cazeau ‘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 Giroux 1 CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER EDUCATION – we desperately need critical pedagogy to resist that. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means helping students develop the skills to question the squo. 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 PROFIT OVER PEOPLE – capitalism values space only if people can make money from it. 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 implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood. Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements invented, and the same end product organizes the work process itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-operation, the number of assistants, etc. During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else. The same standards of means and end apply to the product itself. Though it is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and is the end of the fabrication process, it never becomes, so to speak, an end in itself, at least not as long as it remains an object for use. The chair which is the end of carpentering can show its usefulness only by again becoming a means, either as a thing whose durability permits its use as a means for comfortable living or as a means of exchange. The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.19 This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen-— like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness. Within the category of means and end, and among the experiences of instrumentality which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is "an end in itself." 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). Advocacy Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. 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. Part 3: It’s Easy if You Try
Jones 5 THE PRESENT ISN’T THE FUTURE – reimaginations are possible. The figure above is an instance of Indigenous EF, representing a challenge to Eurocentric futurity through art. Such forms of EF disrupt dominant, one-dimensional narratives about how space ought to be. 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 Ethnofuturism 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. E 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. 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 interprets 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 inhabitants of the region, in solution of ethical challenges”. “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 all over the world, though we rarely look to higher education for interventions and inspiration. It is to a consideration of higher education in these terms that I want to turn now. At a time when higher education is under siege all over the globe by market mentalities and moralities, there is an urgent necessity on the part of the American public to reclaim the academy in its multiple forms as a site of critique and a public good, one that connects knowledge and power, scholarship and public life, and pedagogy and civic engagement. The current assault on higher education makes clear that it should not be reduced in value to cost-benefit analyses or harnessed to the singular needs of corporations, which often leads to the loss of egalitarian and democratic pressures. Universities should be about more than developing work-related skills; they should be about life and the search for knowledge and meaning. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens—citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue, and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics, “and collective resistance. Universities are one of the few places left where a struggle for the commons and for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the media of collective voices and social movements”. | 2/21/22 |
JF - Lobbying ACTournament: Columbia | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington TG | Judge: Bennet Fees “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. Will we find, like the British East India Company, that SpaceX and Blue Origin’s space colonies are ultimately incorporated into an arm of the state, inadvertently transforming the United States into an intergalactic empire? Will space corporations, following the Virginia or Massachusetts Bay Companies, break free of their home states (and planets) and become independent governing entities on the moon or Mars? Or will Bezos and Musk, in the image of King Leopold’s horrifically violent Belgian Congo, wrangle their way into becoming personal kings of princely celestial estates? And will states be able to stop them? The language of inevitability that proponents of space colonization deploy obscures another, better option: that we do not colonize space at all. Last July, we saw billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos engage in a private spaceship flight competition. Since the pandemic started, billionaires have seen their fortunes increase by tens of billions and are continuing to throw money into extravagant projects. Between the catastrophic state of our climate, the spread of diseases and the rates of poverty, any investment in less fortunate people could go a long way, but we have yet to see them go the extra mile toward that. Space travel has involved massive government projects throughout history, whereas recently, there's been a switch to private industry. This shift only worked to benefit these billionaires' companies, putting them at the forefront of scientific achievement. The point of this so-called race is said to be “making humanity multiplanetary.” However, framing this project to be for the good of humanity is a deceiving sentiment. In reality, it all comes down to billionaires’ potential profits from satellite launches and rocketry firms. With as unbelievable of a goal as this, their first step to achieving it is space tourism. Reaching a culmination of waste, the companies are in the process of creating tourism programs with unthinkable costs that only cater to the richest. The fact of the matter is that Earth is undeniably in a state of crisis, but space is much worse. With barely liveable conditions, space inhabitance was not made for the human race; it will take centuries, if ever, before the moon or any other planet can become a home to humans. A fatal flaw of these plans is that billionaires are rooted in an idealistic way of thinking — they truly believe living in space is the answer to Earth’s rotting. Even then, that is if they are considering the environmental impact they have or if they are simply doing this for their own gain and glory. With Bezos’ carbon footprint resting at 2224.2 tonnes and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk estimated at 2084 tonnes in 2018, these men prove themselves to be more concerned with company profit than means of sustainability. Due to the high amount of resources rapidly used, Branson’s and Bezos’ flight programs were only a few minutes long, a fleeting moment in space costing millions; I cannot see how this could be interpreted as a necessary endeavor, above all else. As far as the exact costs of the spaceships go, Musk’s SpaceX originally spent $1.2 million on lobbying in the first half of 2021, while Bezos gradually increased spending in hopes to beat SpaceX for the $2.9 billion NASA contract.Although NASA awarded SpaceX the contract for the moon landing project, it was promptly suspended due to legal pressure from Bezos’ company. Nothing screams boredom and greed more than a billionaire begging for billions more. Critics specifically called out Branson for his focus on self-image and commercialization of his spaceship program. He coined himself "Astronaut 001" and provides a spaceflight experience geared toward customers, but he is really only selling the company name. People are so fed up with financial elites that there is even a petition going around on change.org requesting Bezos not be allowed to return to Earth. Although intangible, the 150,000 signatures exemplify how citizens are reacting to the exploits of the rich. Instead of providing money and resources to better the planet we live on, these billionaires are preaching a future among outer space. NASA has previously funded earth science initiatives, but funding was repealed by congressional conservatives in an effort to focus on interplanetary exploration. Across the board, billionaires are leading the scene, and preserving the planet is the last thing on their agenda. The days when accomplished scientists ventured into space for exploration are long over and have been replaced by billionaires’ pursuits to treat space like a new toy. We are witnessing a dystopian future evolve now more than ever, wherein all we are meant to do is sit back and watch it unfold. The problems that plague the Earth have yet to be accounted for, and employing space as a method of escape is the least efficient use of spending. Addressing solutions for restoring Earth is much more viable than fleeing it. | 2/21/22 |
ND - Fem ACTournament: Princeton | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Lexington JB | Judge: Albert Kang, Zachary Siegel Sreeta Basu UNICEF SCHOOLS HAVE DECLARED A WAR ON WOMEN: gender-unequal education is rampant globally. Despite evidence demonstrating how central girls’ education is to development, gender disparities in education persist. Around the world, 129 million girls are out of school, including 32 million of primary school age, 30 million of lower-secondary school age, and 67 million of upper-secondary school age. In countries affected by conflict, girls are more than twice as likely to be out of school than girls living in non-affected countries. Only 49 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education. At the secondary level, the gap widens: 42 per cent of countries have achieved gender parity in lower secondary education, and 24 per cent in upper secondary education. The reasons are many. Barriers to girls’ education – like poverty, child marriage and gender-based violence – vary among countries and communities. Poor families often favour boys when investing in education. In some places, schools do not meet the safety, hygiene or sanitation needs of girls. In others, teaching practices are not gender-responsive and result in gender gaps in learning and skills development. Gender-equitable education systems empower girls and boys and promote the development of life skills – like self-management, communication, negotiation and critical thinking – that young people need to succeed. They close skills gaps that perpetuate pay gaps, and build prosperity for entire countries. Gender-equitable education systems can contribute to reductions in school-related gender-based violence and harmful practices, including child marriage and female genital mutilation. An education free of negative gender norms has direct benefits for boys, too. In many countries, norms around masculinity can fuel disengagement from school, child labour, gang violence and recruitment into armed groups. The need or desire to earn an income also causes boys to drop out of secondary school, as many of them believe the curriculum is not relevant to work opportunities. They add: United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. “Girls’ education: Gender equality in education benefits every child.” UNICEF.org, 2021. unicef.org/education/girls-education CH Investing in girls’ education transforms communities, countries and the entire world. Girls who receive an education are less likely to marry young and more likely to lead healthy, productive lives. They earn higher incomes, participate in the decisions that most affect them, and build better futures for themselves and their families. Girls’ education strengthens economies and reduces inequality. It contributes to more stable, resilient societies that give all individuals – including boys and men – the opportunity to fulfil their potential. But education for girls is about more than access to school. It’s also about girls feeling safe in classrooms and supported in the subjects and careers they choose to pursue – including those in which they are often under-represented. When Resistance Counts The contribution of ‘new’ knowledges into organizational theory, notably feminist theory, has increased the focus and appreciation of micropolitical resistance within organizations. However, a key tension with this form of resistance, for feminists, has been its transformational and political potential. Traditionally, feminist theorizing and resistance studies have had at their core not only an understanding of social and structural relations, but also an ideological imperative to change them, removing inequalities and injustices. The emphasis, especially in the early days of feminism, was on a practical politics and on the development of theory that would be committed to ending female oppression and to promoting emancipation and progress. Feminist resistance, therefore, to have any meaning must make a difference, arising from a commitment to a political position as well as political action. Microprocesses of resistance, although often discounted within a totalizing ‘revolution or nothing’ conceptualization (Fleming and Sewell, 2002) can still maintain a political project which, although they may not result in radical rupture or apocalyptic change, may nevertheless have effects. Therefore, whilst the examples of resistance cited in this study might seem small and somewhat constrained, they work to reduce tension and discomfort offering a more autonomous and empowered self. As Faith (1994) argues, ‘resistance weakens processes of victimization, and generates personal and political empowerment through the act of naming violations and refusing to collaborate with oppressors’ (1994:39). Reading the texts of social worker professionals/managers does not present images of victimization. Relating to a theme raised by individuals in the research, the ‘new’ social worker professional/manager is required to be unthinking, procedural, dispassionate and above all, unquestioning and obedient. However, Simon the ‘maverick’ manager of a day care centre, argues that he revels in ‘being awkward’ and challenging a compliant and docile subject position. In his text, he creates a highly positive sense of self, even though he accepts that his career progression has been negatively affected: ‘Well I’m still a day centre manager, not a team manager or a service manager.’ He tells how he is too dynamic for the service and of the importance of ‘being yourself’. Part 2: Work from Home White ALL THE WORK, NONE OF THE PAY: currently, women do three to four hours of unrecognized labor every day. Over the past 25 years, according to the United Nations, about 2 billion people have seen improvements in health care, sanitation, and job opportunities. That’s tremendous progress, but, as UN researchers note in a new report, paying attention to how those jobs are divvied up and compensated is important, especially from the perspective of making sure that poor and marginalized groups are getting their fair share. Women, in particular, are continually excluded from some of these economic improvements. For the most part, the work associated with everyday life, such as cooking, cleaning, and looking after children, continues to fall to women. In poorer nations, these time-consuming (and uncompensated) tasks can include long journeys to gather water or firewood, but similar gender gaps are prevalent in developed nations, too. In the U.S., where the division of labor has moved toward equality in the past 50 years, women still perform several hours of unpaid labor every week in the form of care taking or housekeeping. “Women work more than men, even if a large part is relatively invisible,” the report concludes. In total, the UN finds, women do three out of every four hours of unpaid labor, while men do two-thirds of work that is paid. And, by and large, women are more likely to be employed in more vulnerable and tenuous occupations than men, working informal jobs where they can be taken advantage of or dismissed without legal protections. (Even when women do get paid for their labor, they aren’t making as much as men: Globally, women’s wages are on average 24 percent less than men’s.) As the pandemic stretches into its 18th month, the burnout that comes with a surge in coronavirus cases and uncertainty about returning to the office has pushed many employees to their limits. New data from Lean In and McKinsey and Company, however, shows that the gap between women and men who feel burned out has nearly doubled — and that disparity is driving more women to consider downshifting their career or leaving the workforce altogether. In its annual “Women in the Workplace” report, Lean In and McKinsey and Company found that 1 in 3 women have considered changing or leaving their jobs in the past year, compared with 1 in 4 women who were surveyed in 2020. While both men and women are reporting higher rates of burnout this year compared with last year, the gap between men and women who feel overwhelmed has nearly doubled: 42 of women and 35 of men say they are burned out, compared with 32 of women and 28 of men last year. “It’s really concerning,” Rachel Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Leanin.org, tells CNBC Make It. “Women are continuing to do a disproportionate amount of housework and child care throughout the pandemic compared to men, but on top of these obvious drivers of burnout, we see that women are taking on more work in the office around employee well-being, as well as advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, which means their workloads just going up and up and up.” Women are doing more underrecognized, underpaid work than men Between 2019 and 2020, the share of women in C-suite roles grew slightly, and more women of color were promoted to managerial roles. Despite these gains, women are still thwarted by the “broken rung,” which is a woman’s first promotion to manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager in 2020, 89 white women and 85 women of color were promoted, compared with 89 white women and 79 women of color in 2019, according to Lean In and McKinsey and Company’s newest data. While companies have signaled their commitment to DEI efforts amid increased calls for racial justice across the country, women leaders have shouldered DEI efforts more often than their male colleagues — but they are not getting formal recognition for this work. The Women in the Workplace report found that women leaders are more likely than men at the same level to champion DEI efforts outside of their normal job responsibilities: 1 in 5 women senior leaders spend a substantial amount of time on DEI work that is not central to their job, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 men senior leaders. The report notes that these efforts are at risk of becoming “the new office housework.” While companies say they support DEI initiatives, most do not recognize this work in performance reviews and it usually isn’t compensated. “It’s mission critical to the organization, yet if it goes unrewarded and unrecognized, what happens?” Thomas says. “Not only are women not getting credit, and it’s hindering their advancement in the workplace, but if you signal this work isn’t important, it’s less likely to get done.” This pattern has broader implications for companies beyond feeding burnout among working women, Jess Huang, a partner at McKinsey and Company and one of the report’s authors, tells CNBC Make It. “Companies are really at risk of losing the leadership that’s helped them weather the storm of the last few years,” she says. “Many companies have performed well during the pandemic, and that’s thanks to the women that have stepped up to do more to ensure their colleagues are working effectively and investing in DEI efforts.” Between the ongoing caregiving crisis women face and overwhelming demands at work, many working women are reaching a breaking point, Huang adds. “They’re doing more at home, they’re doing more in the workplace, and they’re really burned out,” she says. “If companies don’t address the unrecognized work that women are putting in that has a very real, positive impact on their performance and the broader burnout problem, they’re going to lose the leaders that are making a huge difference for them at this critical moment.” The strike made a difference because it allowed feminism to go beyond the borders of the “woman question,” to become both a mass political practice and a means by which to question the whole neoliberal order at the very moment in which patriarchal violence had begun to be recognized as fundamental to it. Yet in Italy this step has been neither immediate nor easy. The organization of the strike through local initiatives and coordination at the national level, including a huge assembly held in Bologna at the beginning of February, was accompanied by an intense debate, one that had already arisen in response to the November demonstration. Should the movement be constituted by women only? Should men, identified as the agents of patriarchy and violence, be allowed to participate in assemblies, demonstrations, and in the strike itself? This debate mainly involved activists and did not take into account the strike's many other participants, for some of whom this question of separatism was irrelevant. Women went on strike and occupied public squares in order to refuse sexual harassment and violence in workplaces, streets, and houses. They went on strike to oppose the burden of the sexual division of labor. They went on strike to oppose institutional racism and the use of residential permits to turn migrants into a fully disposable workforce and to expose migrant women to sexual violence, often imposed as something that they must accept silently in order to avoid deportation. Women also went on strike to oppose cuts to social benefits and services, cuts that put renewed pressure on women to perform domestic labor and that thus form part of a broader exploitation of sex and gender roles for the sake of profit. Women demonstrated that their oppression plays a fundamental role in the dismantling and monetization of welfare, the precarization of labor, the government of mobility and the maintenance of borders, and the reproduction of relationships of power and domination. In this way, the strike swept away all sorts of “identity politics”: it went beyond the denunciation of specific conditions experienced by women as actual or potential victims of male violence. The strike was thus also an effort to refuse the position of victims and the disposability of lives, labor, and bodies imposed through violence. By participating in the strike, women drew attention to the neoliberal relationships between patriarchal violence and the violence of capitalist global society, and they pointed to the possibilities of radically questioning a whole system whose reproduction is based on their subordination. This is why the strike managed to mobilize not only women, but also men, precarious workers of all genders, and migrants. Women were the leading force in the organization of the strike, but it marked a horizon for all those who aim to take back their power and effectively fight against oppression and exploitation. Recently, former first lady Michelle Obama spoke about experiencing ”low-grade depression” caused by the double pandemic of covid-19 and racial strife. It was a striking admission from a woman regarded as a strong role model. But as Black female psychiatrists, we know that even the healer needs healing sometimes. We and our colleagues are well versed in diagnosing depression and anxiety. Some of us suffer from it ourselves. But what all Black women are facing today is something different, something additional. Black women sit squarely at the confluence of multiple systems of oppression, and are experiencing a disproportionate loss of life and livelihood in the era of covid-19. Lately we have seen an unusual number of Black women exhibit symptoms that would normally be attributed to depression, including fatigue, sleep disturbances and hopelessness. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (DSM-5), our profession’s handbook of mental disorders, consideration of any diagnosis of major depressive disorder must take into account any “underlying cause.” If one exists, it must be treated first. In the case of Black women, the symptoms are the inevitable result of the pandemic’s impact on human psyches that are already systematically oppressed and battered. Our current mental health systems over-pathologize Black women’s experience of pain and trauma without first affirming the source of the stress: ongoing delayed justice for our community. The pressures are easily seen: According to a report by the nonprofit organization Lean In, Black women are nearly twice as likely as White men to say that they’ve been laid off, furloughed, or had their hours and/or pay reduced because of the pandemic. Black women are more likely than White workers to work outside the home as essential workers. Black women are also taking on more responsibility as caregivers, the study shows. Almost half of Black households with children are headed by single women, and so must face issues of child care and virtual schooling on their own. Black women report spending three times as many hours per week caring for elderly or sick relatives as do White women. In June, a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 31 percent of Black adults personally knew someone who had died of covid-19, compared to 9 percent of Whites. An online survey of more than 1,000 Black women by Essence magazine had similar findings, and also noted that 63 percent of respondents felt their mental health was being affected by the pandemic. Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic As Black female psychiatrists, we recognize the feeling of being overwhelmed. There aren’t many of us: Roughly 2 percent of practicing physicians in the United States identify as Black women. Of those, only a small number choose psychiatry as their specialty. Like our male counterparts, many of us choose to practice in Black communities because we know firsthand how the mental health profession overlooks Black people. We think often of the fact that only one in three African Americans who need mental health care receive it. We know that compared with the general population, African Americans who seek mental health care are less likely to be offered either evidence-based medications or talk therapy. Even if we all saw patients 24/7, we Black female psychiatrists could never meet the mental health needs of Black women. On the rare occasion that we meet, we speak freely about the anguish we feel. We tell each other how we cried when our own therapists asked how we were holding up. We let our shoulders slump from the weight of it. We admit that we have no answers, and at times feel hopeless. And then we get up again, and we do our jobs. Without doubt, all Americans are at an elevated risk of mental health problems because of the stress of the pandemic. However, the tremendous social, psychological and economic load placed on Black women in particular warrants dedicated attention. As psychiatrists, and as Black women, we believe it is imperative that our mental health is a national priority. Black women uphold households and serve the country as essential workers. We are strong. We are resilient. We persevere. But what we really need to maintain mental health is societal change, at all levels. Howard Resolved: A just government ought to recognize the right of women workers to strike. To clarify, the aff refers to laborers who identify as women. The aff is a form of negative state action – we aim to prevent the state from cracking down on women when they choose to strike, modeled after the “Women’s Day Off” in Iceland. Yet domestic labour has always been a tricky injustice to protest against. It takes place in the privacy of the home, making it difficult for women to see each other doing this work and to collectively acknowledge that men do not share equally in its burden (and they don’t: the average British woman still contributes 60 more washing, wiping and childcare a week than the average British man, even as the pandemic has increased this work to around nine hours per day). And there can also be dire consequences if we withdraw this labour: children uncared for and vulnerable relatives unfed. “A women’s strike is impossible; that is why it is necessary,” claims Women’s Strike Assembly (WSA), an activist alliance that, to mark last week’s International Women’s Day, called for a series of banner memorials to be erected around the UK to declare why #westrike as women (or, just as importantly, why we can’t). In a manifesto published in November, WSA wrote: “We strike because we are tired of our labour being taken for granted. We strike because we now have to do a triple shift: our paid work, our unpaid domestic labour and educating our children during the pandemic.” In Liverpool, Bristol and Edinburgh women gathered, last Monday, in socially distanced clusters toting their banner memorials. “#westrike because we are tired. Very, very tired,” a banner in Liverpool read and a memorial painted by Bristol Sisterhood stated, simply: “Fuck macho bullshit, women on fire.” Many of the social media protests, however, indicated why last Monday saw no wholesale abandonment of women’s posts. “I am a freelancer and I would not get paid (or lose my client!). But I’m striking with my compañeras in mind and spirit,” one IWD banner read, and another: “I cannot strike but I lit a candle in solidarity.” Recent years have seen a flowering of strikes against gendered labour in Spain and South America. In 2018, six million women joined Spain’s 2018 “Dia Sin Mujeres’ (day without women), including Madrid’s Manuela Carmena and actress Penelope Cruz, as “feminist men in solidarity” staffed a network of collective nurseries. Old-fashioned mother’s aprons, the symbol of the strikes, were stitched in solidarity workshops and strung from balconies. But, in Britain, women’s general labour strikes have been conspicuously absent. Selma James, the cofounder of 70s marxist activist project Wages for Housework, has a theory to account for this lack. She points out that as the power of unions dwindles, the climate in Anglo-Saxon countries is less hospitable to gestures of withdrawn labour, even as feminist identity marches gain broader support. Without union protection, British and north American women who strike from paid work risk losing their jobs; to the single mum on the breadline in a pandemic, strikes, in this context, seem the preserve of privileged white feminists. For all this, calling political attention to the pandemic’s third shift is an urgent project. Only 36 of British women have been able to continue working full time alongside their caring responsibilities during the pandemic, compared to 66 of men, and mothers are more likely to have quit or lost their job. As the pandemic recedes over a nation of shattered women, there will be opportunities for direct action. Women’s March, Pregnant Then Screwed and Women’s Strike Assembly, among others, are calling for protests and marches to highlight the structural sexism that’s left women bearing the brunt of reproductive labour during this year of crisis. James, in the meantime, advocates a daily constellation of “small resistances”: banging pots and pans at your window; stringing up a banner and apron; radically lowering domestic standards. Forty-five years after the Women’s Day Off, Iceland has ranked top in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report – an index that examines educational opportunities, life expectancy, pay equity and the average time spent on housework – in 13 of the past 16 years. Yes, it’s impossible for many women to strike; but can we afford not to? Brewer Strikes forces men to bear some of the responsibility women deal with daily – Iceland proves. Forty years ago, the women of Iceland went on strike - they refused to work, cook and look after children for a day. It was a moment that changed the way women were seen in the country and helped put Iceland at the forefront of the fight for equality. When Ronald Reagan became the US President, one small boy in Iceland was outraged. "He can't be a president - he's a man!" he exclaimed to his mother when he saw the news on the television. It was November 1980, and Vigdis Finnbogadottir, a divorced single mother, had won Iceland's presidency that summer. The boy didn't know it, but Vigdis (all Icelanders go by their first name) was Europe's first female president, and the first woman in the world to be democratically elected as a head of state. Many more Icelandic children may well have grown up assuming that being president was a woman's job, as Vigdis went on to hold the position for 16 years - years that set Iceland on course to become known as "the world's most feminist country". But Vigdis insists she would never have been president had it not been for the events of one sunny day - 24 October 1975 - when 90 of women in the country decided to demonstrate their importance by going on strike. Instead of going to the office, doing housework or childcare they took to the streets in their thousands to rally for equal rights with men. It is known in Iceland as the Women's Day Off, and Vigdis sees it as a watershed moment. "What happened that day was the first step for women's emancipation in Iceland," she says. "It completely paralysed the country and opened the eyes of many men." Banks, factories and some shops had to close, as did schools and nurseries - leaving many fathers with no choice but to take their children to work. There were reports of men arming themselves with sweets and colouring pencils to entertain the crowds of overexcited children in their workplaces. Sausages - easy to cook and popular with children - were in such demand the shops sold out. It was a baptism of fire for some fathers, which may explain the other name the day has been given - the Long Friday. "We heard children playing in the background while the newsreaders read the news on the radio, it was a great thing to listen to, knowing that the men had to take care of everything," says Vigdis. Calling this action a “strike” does have both practical and symbolic significance, even though strikes can be difficult to do well. For instance, strikes are about pushing for change in the workplace. But in every workplace, whether it’s the home or the corporate boardroom, women’s work is often taken for granted. Women tend to take on more chores and child care duties at home than men, and women are more likely than men to take on tasks at work that nobody else wants to do. Meanwhile, women tend to get paid less for all that trouble, or not get paid at all. The idea behind a women’s general strike is that if women refuse to do all of their typical work for a day, it will force people to notice how important and under-appreciated that work is. The “International Women’s Strike” might still end up working more like a protest or a boycott than a bona fide general strike, Elisabeth Clemens, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, told Vox. But it can still be a very effective way to draw attention and energy to women’s rights. “The name does project a sense of global solidarity, and that’s a really powerful move,” Clemens said. Sometimes, if it’s clear that a large number of people share your grievances — that if you show up to a protest, you won’t be alone and thousands of others will join you — it can create a virtuous cycle that attracts more and more new activists who are fired up for women’s rights. In an article for Elle about the historical context of the strike, writer Sady Doyle asked what it really means for women to go on strike in 2017 — when all women still face discrimination, but some women have opportunities that previous generations only dreamed of. This inequality, Doyle writes, can make it harder for women to really empathize with each other’s struggles when it comes to work: In an earlier era of highly segregated career paths, a "women's strike" had a specific, tangible effect: It made invisible work visible. No women meant no food on the table, no mysteriously emptied trashcans, no one to change diapers or type letters. No women meant no sex. (Yes, going Lysistrata is a real thing—and it occasionally works.) Forcing men to handle "women's work" was the only way to get those men to admit that it existed. Today women have better access to education and high-paying jobs than ever. But because of these changes it's harder than ever to define women's precise relationship to "work," or to pinpoint a specific problem that female workers can address through striking. Sure, we can walk out of our jobs—but we won't all be walking out of the same jobs, for the same reasons, and some of us can walk out much more safely than others. Then again, Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths argued at the Nation, it’s a little strange to think of a strike as “privileged” when strikes are usually a tool of last resort for the least privileged workers. They say that our current situation is closer than we might think to the dire 1908 origins of International Women’s Day, when a group of women garment workers went on strike to demand suffrage and the right to form a union: Unions were virtually nonexistent then, to say nothing of the brutal working conditions that resulted from their absence (146 people, mostly women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911). Union membership today is at a historic low (10.7 percent and decreasing in 2016). Was it a privilege for garment workers to strike then? Would it be a privilege for us to strike now? And just because the strike could reflect elite concerns, Alcazar and Griffiths said, doesn’t mean it has to; it can also be a powerful chance for more elite women to connect with more marginalized women, and for both groups to develop more kinship and solidarity with each other. Bland puts it another way: “Those of us who are able to strike on March 8 are striking on behalf of those who can't,” she said. “We have to be there to represent each other.” But while some women’s strikes have a very specific political purpose women have also gone on strike in countries from Argentina to Iceland to protest a range of different issues: violence against women, restrictions on reproductive rights, and gender-based inequality of all kinds. They often protest many of these issues at once. “There is no question that the framework of organizing as women has been incredibly important and effective,” Clemens said. The category of “women” may be a big one, but it also covers a lot of ground. For instance, when we think of combatting “violence” against women, strike organizers argue that we shouldn’t limit our imagination to things like domestic violence or sexual violence. We should also think about “the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women; the violence of state criminalization of migratory movements; the violence of mass incarceration; and the institutional violence against women’s bodies through abortion bans and lack of access to free healthcare and free abortion.” This intersectional way of thinking about feminism — paying attention to how different problems connect to one another, and how they can combine to harm different groups of people in different ways — was quite successful at the Women’s March. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, told Vox she surveyed Women’s March attendees with a team of researchers. They found that an unusually high number of marchers were first-time protesters — and that they came out for a wide variety of intersectional reasons. Most marchers (about 60 percent) said they decided to protest because of “women’s rights,” which wasn’t surprising. But more than a third of respondents said they were also motivated by either the environment, racial justice, or LGBTQ rights, and 21 percent said they were motivated by immigration. “We’re all part of the movement, we’re all part of the resistance,” Bland said. “As opposed to only working with the partners we're familiar with, what the Women’s March did was really break down silos between a lot of the different groups, and allow us all to collaborate and cooperate with each other at a magnitude not previously seen.” Thus, we see how social worker professionals/managers are adapting and/or drawing on alternative subjectivities to those offered in the dominant discourse. This invoking of difference is a form of resistance in itself as well as the catalyst for resistant behaviours and acts, and further discursive challenge. In other words, challenging one subject position involves drawing on an alternative or subverting the original, in a process of reinterpreting dominant discourses. Resistance is therefore not only oppositional and a negative kicking back against the subjectivity offered but also a critical and ultimately generative reflexive process (McNay, 2000; Thomas and Davies, 2005). These forms of resistance are often small-scale in nature, centring on destabilizing truths, challenging subjectivities and normalizing discourses. In particular, the work of Foucauldian feminists has drawn attention to resistance in reinscribing and rewriting dominant organizational discourses (Kondo, 1990; Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Dick, 2004; Katila and Meril¨ainen, 2002; Thomas and Davies, 2005; Brewis, 2004). In debating the difficulties surrounding the loss of a collective oppression, feminists have focused attention on more situated and contingent forms of resistance and agency. Therefore, rather than essentializing resistance and treating it as an established set of acts and behaviours, pre-defined by academics (with some special access to knowledge), we need to appreciate its constitution ‘emerging out of the multiple interpretations of both workplace actors and academic researchers’ (Prasad and Prasad, 1998: 251). This form of resistance is intentional and identified and defined as resistance by the individuals concerned. The constitutive process of owning resistance (Prasad and Prasad, 2000) transforms acts and behaviours that are not overtly or visibly resistant into the realm of the subversive, thus broadening what counts as resistance. We see within this understanding of ‘what counts as resistance’, the promotion of multipolitics and local struggles that recognizes difference and is focused on undermining institutional power where it is found. However, the political adequacy of these forms of resistance and their ability to transcend the local to impact and transform collective norms, is a constant tension within feminism. It is to this issue of the ‘effects’ of resistance that we now turn. | 2/21/22 |
NovDec - Prison Workers ACTournament: Princeton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AR | Judge: Faizaan Dossani 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 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. Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist strategies. Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19 Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights advocacy and reforms, building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration. | 12/4/21 |
NovDec - Sex Workers ACTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harker AS | Judge: Claudia Ribera ROJ and Dunt THE SEX WORK DISCUSSION HAS BEEN TABLED - it’s time to reopen the discussion. 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 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. Thus, I affirm: 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. 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.” 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. In response to the US state of Georgia’s new law that bans abortion after the heartbeat is detected, actress Alyssa Milano urged women to stage a ‘sex strike’. “Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy,” she tweeted. Milano’s tweet quickly came under intense scrutiny, with many pointing out the suggestion women set up a picket line in their pants only reinforces the idea men are owed sex and women don’t really enjoy it all that much anyway. The tweet also led to several articles that look at the history of sex strikes, which claim the tactic has a high success rate. But, the truth is far more complex than that. Women have not effected great political change simply by refusing men sex. It’s true sex strikes have occurred throughout history, but they are typically deployed as one tactic among many other forms of protest. Sex strikes do not work because women deny their partners sex, they work because they attract considerable media attention to the cause. The most famous sex strike in history appears in ‘Lysistrata’, an Ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes. In the play, Greek women end the Peloponnesian War by refusing to have sex with their men folk. The work is entirely fictional but has become a byword for sex strikes ever after. In ‘Politics of Nonviolent Action’ (1973), Gene Sharp lists 198 non-violent acts of resistance, and calls the mass withholding of sex ‘Lysistranic nonaction’. Although examples of such action almost exclusively involve women refusing sex to men, in 2010 Stanley Kalembaye, a Ugandan opposition politician, urged his male supporters to deny their wives sex until they voted for him: “I suggest you tell them you will deny them conjugal rights until they change parties.” It’s entirely possible there have been other incidents of men withholding sex from their wives and they just didn’t notice, but, with the exception of Kalembaye, sex strikers have always been women. Shure 1 Sex worker’s striking strengthens communities and builds relationships. The gathering in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park on June 2, 2018 felt like a watershed moment: hundreds of sex workers and their allies showed up to commemorate the first International Whore’s Day since the passage of FOSTA/SESTA, a federal law that many sex workers say makes them less safe. It was the largest sex workers’ rights demonstration Kaytlin Bailey, director of communications for Decriminalize Sex Work, had ever seen: “There were hundreds of people there instead of dozens,” she recalled. “Just to see the energy and the mass of people coming together in public space to declare themselves either out as sex workers or as their allies felt like a transformative moment. And it was caused, I think, by the immediate impact of FOSTA/SESTA.” FOSTA/SESTA allows the government to hold online platforms liable for facilitating illegal sex trade, incentivizing websites to crack down on a broad range of users’ erotic content. Passed under the guise of halting sex-trafficking, critics say the law endangers sex workers by preventing them from finding and screening clients, as well as maintaining critical networks with colleagues that share resources, warnings, and other forms of support in an often perilous industry. As Bailey explained, unlike localized brothel raids or policing of street-based sex work, FOSTA/SESTA Sex Workers’ Rights Are Workers’ Rights targeted all forms of sex work at once — inadvertently binding sex workers together by making visible their shared struggle. 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. 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. In short, the sex trade is disproportionately comprised of poor and marginalized people, and they’re made ever more so by criminalization. In making their case, Mac and Smith counter the talking points of organizations in the so-called “rescue industry” that try to save people from sex work, as well as carceral feminists who call for “ending demand” or broader implementation of the Nordic model. Interventions that attempt to legally punish the sex trade out of existence, or to whisk individuals out of it by retraining them for other low-paid jobs, do nothing to challenge the lack of social and economic power that nudges people into sex work in the first place. As Bailey put it, “if you have a problem with someone doing something they otherwise wouldn’t for money, you don’t have a problem with sex work — you have a problem with capitalism.” Of course, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to have a problem with. But the way to address it isn’t by prohibiting society’s most stigmatized trades — it’s by building workers’ power to dictate the terms of their labor. By organizing in solidarity with one another, sex workers could live safer, more stable, and more dignified lives. They could fight back against the harms of clients and extractive managers, and fight to win resources that confer real agency over their lives by broadening their range of choices beyond “sell sex or die.” But decriminalization of sex work is a precondition for any of that, and must be centralized as a fundamental socialist demand. It’s a demand sex workers themselves have been making for a long time. They deserve some solidarity. | 11/6/21 |
NovDec - Stock ACTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Walt Whitman EY | Judge: Silma Bathily ROJ and Giroux 1 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 socia cal ections 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-intellect ualism, 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. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Education, which means they must enhance our potential to fight dominant, oppressive social biases. Thus, whoever better promotes critical empowerment wins. Bogage et al TIME’S UP – workers are striking, but employers aren’t listening – they’re just replacing those who speak out. Factory workers, nurses and school bus drivers are among the tens of thousands of Americans who walked off jobs in October amid a surge of labor activism that economists and labor leaders have dubbed “Striketober.” The strike drives, experts say, stem from the new leverage workers hold in the nation’s tight job market: Having seen the massive profits their companies collected during the coronavirus pandemic, they want their contributions acknowledged in the form of better pay and working conditions. While work stoppages may contribute to near-term inflation and production tie-ups, economists say they could fundamentally change the economic standing of millions of workers. Here’s what you need to know about the tide of recent strikes. WHAT TO KNOW Why are so many workers on strike? Do the strikes have anything to do with the “Great Resignation?” How many workers are on strike? Have the strikes been effective for workers? What do all these strikes mean for my job? What do all these strikes mean for the broader economy? Why are so many workers on strike? There are a number of reasons, but ultimately it comes down to how the pandemic has changed the way people see themselves, their employers and their jobs — especially if going to work heightened their risk of exposure to the deadly virus. So while millions of people quit or switched positions, others have staged walkouts — or at least are threatening to. “People don’t want to go and die at work. I mean, they’re not compensated enough,” said Kim Cordova, president of the 23,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers in Colorado. Strikes or strike authorizations — when a union supports a walkout if negotiations with management break down — typically revolve around compensation. At John Deere, where 10,000 workers at 14 factories walked off the job on Oct. 14, employees want better pay and retirement benefits. The company offered 5 to 6 percent raises in a new collective bargaining agreement, but workers say it’s not enough, given the company’s soaring profits. Kaiser Permanente nurses and health workers in California and Oregon want the health care provider to drop a proposed two-tiered wage and benefits system that would compensate new employees less than existing ones. More than 30,000 workers represented by several unions authorized a strike in an Oct. 11 vote. More than 1,400 Kellogg workers in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Michigan and Tennessee went on strike on Oct. 5, seeking better benefits, vacation time and trying to defeat a two-tier wage system. Several hundred of those employees returned to work on Tuesday after the company threatened to hire a contractor to replace them. Other workers are using strike drives to try to improve workplace culture. A walkout at Chicago tortilla-maker El Milagro was tied to requests for better safeguards against sexual harassment and coronavirus safety protocols. Management responded to the work stoppage by locking workers out of its factories; executives have not responded publicly to employees’ concerns. Workers at a West Virginia producer of industrial pump parts went on strike Oct. 1 seeking better seniority rights. Do the strikes have anything to do with the “Great Resignation?” Return to menu The “Great Resignation” is the term some economists are using to describe how workers are reevaluating their jobs nearly two years into the pandemic. A record 4.3 million people — or nearly 3 percent of the U.S. workforce — quit their jobs in August alone, Labor Department data shows. So many businesses need employees, economists say, that working people have more leverage than they’ve had in many years. Millions of people are venturing into the job market in search of better wages and working conditions. For others, though, it’s provided the impetus to strike — success can mean more pay and benefits without starting over somewhere else. How many workers are on strike? Some 17,400 U.S. workers went on strike in October, according to a Bloomberg Law work stoppage database. Of the 119 union strikes so far this year, 15 are “major” strikes involving 1,000 or more individuals, according to the database. That compares with nine major strikes in 2020, when the pandemic took hold, and 30 in 2019. Data on U.S. work stoppages is not centralized, so it is difficult to draw direct comparisons between years. But it is clear, economists say, that the 2021 strike movement is historic in both its size and the way it spans across industries. In 2019, strikes mainly occurred among public-sector and health care workers, according to Labor Department and Bloomberg Law data. That trend continued in 2020: Aside from a 10,000-person carpenters strike in Massachusetts in April, 34,000 of the 58,000 workers involved in union-involved strikes were by educators or health service workers. This year, manufacturing workers made up 47 percent of those who began strikes, data show, while education and health services represented 36 percent. In January, 1,400 workers walked out at Hunts Point Produce Market in New York seeking better pay. In March, 1,300 workers in five states from Allegheny Technologies struck over wages and health care premiums. Numbers spiked in recent months after strikes at major corporations including Nabisco (1,000 workers struck for 40 days), Frito-Lay (600 workers struck for 19 days), Kellogg (1,000 workers have been on strike since Oct. 5) and John Deere (10,000 workers have been on strike since Oct. 14). Have the strikes been effective for workers? Results are mixed, economists and labor leaders say. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers won big concessions from their employers, and both groups returned to work in September. Nabisco workers received $5,000 bonuses, annual raises and increased contributions into employees’ 401(k) accounts. Frito-Lay workers stopped their strike after the company agreed to wage increases and a guarantee of at least one day off each week. Hollywood production workers secured concessions from television and film studios after threatening to strike, including mandatory 10-hour break periods between shifts, a 54-hour weekend, 25 percent pay increases for lower-level workers and a $400 million contribution to pension accounts. Those new contracts have galvanized other strike drives across the country, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. Others, though, are still on the picket line — or have returned to work — without winning much from their employers. Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike since April asking for better wages and more vacation time. Their employer, Warrior Met, has continued operations with a nonunionized workforce, and Alabama state police have escorted those workers to the mine through picket lines in recent weeks. Kellogg and John Deere have both run their factories without union members. But 400 Kellogg mechanics broke their strike on Oct. 19 after the company threatened to contract out their work to a third-party vendor. What do all these strikes mean for my job? Short term, the rise in strikes contributes to the existing worker shortage, said Julia Pollak, a labor economist for job site ZipRecruiter. That means there are more job openings and fewer workers to take them, giving all sorts of workers more leverage. The Trump board has repeatedly reversed long-standing board precedent, weakening workers’ rights and giving more power to employers.15 In the two years that Republicans have held the majority on the board, they have overturned NLRB precedent in more than a dozen cases. All of these decisions overturning precedent favor employers. None favor workers or unions. In none of these cases did the Trump board follow the NLRB’s long-standing practice of seeking public input through amicus briefs before reversing precedent.16 The manner and speed with which the Trump board has reversed precedent lays bare their anti-worker, anti-union agenda. And, disturbingly, more decisions are on the horizon, with the Trump GC urging the board to change the law in favor of corporations and against workers in numerous other cases. The Trump board has weakened workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining in every possible area—in the scope of workers covered under the law, in the definition of what activity is protected under the law, in workers’ ability to communicate with their co-workers about workplace issues, in workers’ ability to decide which group of co-workers to organize and bargain with, and in workers’ ability to strike to achieve their goals. At the same time, the Trump board has given employers new tools to restrict communications by workers and unions, and to undermine collective bargaining relationships by making unilateral changes and refusing to recognize incumbent unions. The sweep and imbalance of the Trump board’s decisions are outlined below. They add: The NLRA protects concerted activity—activity by one or more workers asserting a shared concern—on workplace issues, whether or not workers are engaged in the activity through a formal union. If workers are engaged in advocacy around a workplace issue in a group or on behalf of a group—be it protections against sexual harassment, equal pay, health and safety protections, scheduling fairness, or any other workplace issue—an employer may not interfere with this activity or retaliate against workers engaged in this activity. The Trump board has changed the law to narrow what counts as protected concerted activity. Contrary to long-standing precedent, the Trump board ruled in Alstate Maintenance, LLC that an airline skycap (porter) who protested about a lack of customer tips in front of co-workers and a supervisor was not engaged in protected concerted activity—meaning that it was not illegal for the company to fire the worker on account of the protest activity.34 Undermining the right to strike (Case discussed: Walmart Stores, Inc.) The right to strike—the right of workers to withhold their labor in an effort to put economic pressure on their employer to agree with workers’ demands—is at the core of our labor relations system in the United States. Over a period of years, groups of employees at Walmart—the world’s largest company, with 2.2 million employees—engaged in several short strikes to call attention to issues and to pressure Walmart to change its practices. But in July 2019, the Trump board ruled that a group of 100–130 Walmart workers who engaged in a 5–6 day strike to demonstrate at Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting were engaged in an “intermittent” strike that was not protected by labor law. Because the Trump board decided that the strike was an unprotected intermittent strike, Walmart faced no legal consequence for retaliating against the strikers, who included 29 workers who were striking for the first time. In determining that the strike was an unprotected “intermittent” strike, the Trump board made up a new legal test, saying that strikes that take place “pursuant to a ‘plan to strike, return to work, and strike again’” are not protected. As detailed by member McFerran in her dissent, the majority undermines what the Supreme Court has called the “strong interest of federal policy in the legitimate use of the strike.”35 Permitting employers to fire workers in retaliation for union activity (Case discussed: Electrolux Home Products) In a disturbing decision, the Trump board found that an employer gave a false reason for firing a pro-union worker, but the Trump board let the employer off the hook, saying that the general counsel did not show that the employer had an anti-union motivation for firing the worker. The employer told the pro-union worker to “shut up” when she made pro-union comments at a mandatory captive audience meeting, but that was not enough evidence of anti-union bias for the Trump board. According to dissenting member McFerran, the decision “marks the first time in history the board has declined to find a violation of the Act when there is clear reason to infer an anti-union motive and no evidence…of any other lawful motive.”36 McNicholas and Poydock In fact, COVID-era workers need the right to strike more than ever, but it’s subject to huge restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed much about work in the United States: There have been countless examples of workers speaking out against unsafe work conditions and demanding personal protective equipment (PPE) to try and stay healthy and safe on the job. We also have seen that essential workers are often not paid commensurate with the critical nature of their work. Few U.S. workers have access to paid sick time or paid leave of any kind. And, when workers have advocated for health and safety protections or wage increase, they have often been retaliated against, and even fired for doing so. As a result, many workers have decided to strike in an effort to have their voices heard. Even before the pandemic, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed an upsurge in major strike activity in 2018 and 2019, marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period. Further, 2019 recorded the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size. In fact, after decades of decline, strike activity surged in 2018, with 485,200 workers involved in major work stoppages—a nearly twenty-fold increase from 25,300 workers in 2017. The surge in strike activity continued in 2019, with 425,500 workers involved in major work stoppages. On average in 2018 and in 2019, 455,400 workers were involved in major work stoppages—the largest two-year average in 35 years. What is the right to strike and who has it? Most private-sector workers in the United States are guaranteed the right to strike under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Section 7 of the Act grants workers the right “to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” This allows private-sector workers to engage in concerted activities such as strikes, regardless of whether the worker is in a union or covered by a collective bargaining contract. However, those in a union are better situated to engage in a long-term strike through strike funds. There is no federal law that gives public-sector workers the right to strike, but a dozen states grant public-sector workers the right to strike. In general, there are two types of strikes: economic strikes and unfair labor practice strikes. In an economic strike, workers withhold their labor as leverage when bargaining for better pay and working conditions. While workers in economic strikes retain their status as employees and cannot be discharged, their employer has the right to permanently replace them. In an unfair labor practice strike, workers withhold their labor to protest their employer engaging in activities that they regard as a violation of labor law. Workers in an unfair labor practice strike cannot legally be discharged or permanently replaced. However, not all strikes are protected under the law. For example, it is currently unlawful for workers to be involved in “secondary” strikes, which are strikes aimed at an employer other than the primary employer (for example, when workers from one company strike in solidarity with another company’s workers). If a strike is deemed an “intermittent strike”—when workers strike on-and-off over a period of time—it is not protected as a lawful strike by the NLRA. In general, a strike is also unlawful if the collective bargaining agreement between a union and the employer is in effect and has a “no-strike, no-lockout” clause. What data do we have on strikes? Unfortunately, there are major data limitations around strikes. As a result, it is impossible to know the full extent of strike activity throughout the U.S. The main government source for strike data is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on major work stoppages. However, BLS data only include information on work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers that last at least one full shift. Unfortunately, comprehensive data on work stoppages that involve fewer than 1,000 workers, or that last less than one full shift, are not readily available from BLS or other sources. The BLS’s monthly data on work stoppages do not capture any strikes directly related to the coronavirus pandemic. However, it is evident essential workers are going on strike as seen in the recent walkouts organized by Amazon, Instacart, and Target workers as well as the dozens of strikes organized by fast food and delivery workers. Consequently, there is a large gap in knowledge about the true extent of strikes that occur during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond. Based on the very limited data available, the resurgence of strike activity in recent years has given over a million workers an active role in demanding improvements in their pay and working conditions. Essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic are continuing this trend by demanding better pay and safer working conditions from their employers. However, without comprehensive data, it’s impossible to understand the scope of how many workers are utilizing their fundamental right to strike. This knowledge gap makes it difficult for policymakers to adequately address the needs for workers in the United States, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics should be provided funding to gather comprehensive data on worker strikes. But even with the limited knowledge we have, it’s evident that strikes are an effective tool to improve the pay and working conditions of working people. Therefore, strengthening the right to strike for workers needs to be at the heart of labor law reform going forward. Thus, I affirm: The right to strike is peculiar. It is not a right to quit. The right to quit is part of freedom of contract and the mirror of employment-at-will. Workers may quit when they no longer wish to work for an employer; employers may fire their employees when they no longer want to employ them. Either of those acts severs the contractual relation- ship and the two parties are no longer assumed to be in any relationship at all. The right to strike, however, assumes the continuity of the very relationship that is suspended. Workers on strike refuse to work but do not claim to have left the job. After all, the whole point of a strike is that it is a collective work stoppage, not a collective quitting of the job. This is the feature of the strike that has marked it out from other forms of social action. If a right to strike is not a right to quit, what is it? It is the right that workers claim to refuse to perform work they have agreed to do while retaining a right to the job. Most of what is peculiar, not to mention fraught, about a strike is contained in that latter clause. Yet, surprisingly, few commentators recognize just how central and yet peculiar this claim is.Opponents of the right to strike are sometimes more alive to its distinctive features than defenders. One critic, for instance, makes the distinction between quitting and striking the basis of his entire argument: the unqualified right to withdraw labour, which is a clear right of free men, does not describe the behaviour of strikers.... Strikers . . . withdraw from the performance of their jobs, but in the only relevant sense they do not withdraw their labour. Part 3: Fighting Back Gourevitch 2 STRIKES CHALLENGE THE ROOT CAUSE OF VIOLENCE – they begin the reversal of economic and structural domination – impact turns all econ DAs. We now have a way of explaining the right to strike as something decidedly more modern than just residual protection of some feudal guild privilege. The right to strike springs organically from the fact of structural domination. Striking is a way of resisting that domination at the point in that structure at which workers find themselves—the particular job they are bargaining over. It is not that workers believe they have some special privilege but quite the opposite. It is their lack of privilege, their vulnerability, that generates the claim. Structural domination makes its most immediate appearance in the threat of being exploited by a particular employer, even though the point of structural domination is that workers can be exploited by any potential employer. The sharpest form that the structural domination takes is through the threat of being fired, or of never being hired in the first place. The claim that strikers make to their job is therefore, in the first instance, a dramatization of the fact that their relationship is not voluntary, it is not accidental and contingent. They are always already forced to be in a contractual relationship with some employer or another. The refusal to perform work while retaining the right to the job is a way of bringing to the fore this social and structural element in their condition. It vivifies the real nature of the production relationship that workers find themselves in. Quitting the work but not the job is a way of saying that this society is not and cannot be just a system of voluntary exchanges among independent producers. There is an underlying structure of unequal dependence, maintained through the system of contracts, that even the “most voluntary” arrangements conceal. This is not just a dramaturgical fact about strikes, though the drama has, in many cases, been nearly Greek in its intensity and tragedy. It is a point about power. It would not have the drama if it were not a power play. By demanding the job as a matter of right workers do not just publicize their domination, they attempt to challenge the forcing to which they are subject. Limiting the employer’s ability to make contracts with others, and preventing other workers from taking those jobs, is a way of reversing the power relationship. It is a way of neutralizing the threat of losing the job, which is the most concrete, immediate point of contact with that background structure of domination. If you cannot lose your job, you are less vulnerable, less immediately economically dependent. Of course, this does not do away with the background structure itself, but a particular strike can never do that. Though even here, there are times when a strike, as it becomes a more generalized rejection of structural domination—say in large-scale sympathy strikes or general strikes—can begin to challenge the broad structure of economic control itself. Gourevitch 3 AND the RIGHT to strike reverses the power imbalance at the heart of capitalistic labor, regardless of strikes’ outcomes. This is a challenge to the logic of the capitalist labor market that begins from within, at the location of the strike itself. At that point in the system, strikers temporarily reverse the relationships of power by eliminating that employers’ ability to use the threat of job- loss against them. They do that not just by claiming the job but by claiming it as a matter of right. The thought is that the exploitation of workers is unjustifiable, an unjustifiability that appears in the terms of the employment itself. Workers have the right to the job, and therefore to interfere with the employer’s property rights and other workers’ contract rights, because it is unjustifiable to subject workers to exploitative conditions. To be sure, many strikes and many strikers never articulate the argument in this language. But the point is not what workers always explicitly say, but rather what they do and what that doing presupposes. I am reconstructing the ideal presuppositions of a strike, and in particular, how to think about the peculiar set of assumptions about the right to a job. We have seen that it is no atavistic recovery of traditional rights and guild privileges but is a way of resisting a thoroughly modern form of social domination from a point within that structure of domination. Again, facing a freedom to quit the job but not the work, workers assert a right to quit working but keep the job. To put this all another way, though strikes are still about bargaining, and in that sense like market exchanges, they are simultaneously a challenge to the market as the appropriate standard by which to judge the fairness of workers’ compensation. The market is unfair because of workers’ structural disadvantage. Over and against the market value, strikers can argue that there are shared, or at least shareable, standards of fair compensation that employers should adhere to. While here again we see the echoes of feudal theories of “just price” and equity jurisprudence,61 we must note that in principle the claim is not, or does not have to be, based on special privilege. Rather, it begins by challenging the view that labor “freely” finds its value on the market. Workers are always already in relationships with employers and they cannot leave the basic relationship of earning money only by selling labor- power, no matter how many jobs they might quit. The standards we use for evaluating those kinds of forced relationships, like the state, are different, based on shared conceptions of justice and human need, not private agreement. Two final observations before we move to the work- place itself. If the foregoing analysis is correct then we can get a better sense of the way a right to strike relates to the rights of employers and replacement workers. The right to strike does not have to include the claim that employers have no right to use their property to pursue their own interests. It just means employers have no right to use their property in ways that allow them to exploit workers. That is why, from within the theory of the right to strike, employers do not have a unilateral right to hire whomever they please on whatever terms they please. If that latter right is permitted then, of course, employers may take advantage of the fact that every propertyless worker needs a job. Further, the right to strike does not have to mean replacement workers have no right to pursue their interests and make labor contracts. Rather, it means they do not have a right to use that power to reproduce the system of structural domination that puts all workers at an unfair disadvantage. That is why they may not take jobs that striking workers refuse to perform. It is true that, since strike activity has declined by nearly 90 percent from its peak in the 1970s, we might think this form of collective action is no longer relevant (see Figure 1). However, in the past few years, we have seen significant strikes by Chicago teachers and transit workers, nurses and fast food workers, truckers and oil refiners, Verizon and WalMart workers. Some of these actions have spilled out into wider campaigns, most significantly the recent “Fight for $15” strikes whose aim is to raise the minimum wage and which have included everyone from food service workers to child care providers. These strikes have taken place in those sectors expected to add the largest number of jobs in coming years, like health care, food service, and retail. Present and future Supreme Court rulings on topics like public sector union fees and unpaid work have revived interest in labor law generally, after years of relative indifference. Moreover, strikes by British postal workers, South African miners, Belgian and Greek anti-austerity activists, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, speak to the global scope of the issue. Given the new politics of inequality that has emerged after the last decades of relative labor quiescence, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008 and the Euro-crisis of 2010, there is every reason to think that strikes will be as much a part of our future as our past. So the point about structural domination was that workers might be forced to make a variety of explicit concessions on any number of issues—wages, hours, conditions, stultifying jobs. But the point about personal domination in the workplace is that the contract also seems to involve the tacit concession of generic control over a further set of unknown issues. The problem from the standpoint of contract theory is that the contract itself cannot adequately explain why this power is assumed to devolve to the employer nor why law should support this assumption. At most, we can only say that the worker agreed to give up this control, not that she in any way agreed to the various decisions about her work. Usually, however, we do not think a human being has a right to such blanket alienation of her liberty. In the case of work, the only reason supporting that worker’s alienation of control as authoritative seems to be that the worker sold her property—her labor-power—and therefore has no right to control that property for the duration of the work (within the reasonable boundaries of protective labor legislation) or that she owes obligations of deference to the employer. As we have seen, workers resist these accounts on the grounds that their capacity to labor is not a commodity at all. Or at least, labor-power cannot operate as a commodity in this case because a crucial feature of the sale of property —separability of the seller’s will from the commodity sold —is impossible. Therefore whatever the status the labor contract has, the authority relations of the workplace itself cannot legitimately be derived from the contract—at least not from the contract conceived as a sale of property. Workers nevertheless find themselves in a world in which employers do legally possess this arbitrary authority. The strike is, again, one way of challenging this authority by attacking the idea that, since they appear like sellers of their capacity to labor, workers may be treated as subordinates. The strike is a way of pressing the claim that workers, too, should exercise control rather than submit passively to managerial prerogatives. There are many historical examples of resistance to this kind of personal domination, such as “control strikes,” strikes over the introduction of new technology, and even strikes over seemingly lesser issues like “abolition of the luncheon privilege.”74 The general point being that strikes that target decisions usually falling under the domain of “core of entrepreneurial control” are not just about instrumental considerations regarding compensation and conditions but about resisting the very logic of contract and property that supports the manager’s authority in the first place.75 It is worth noting the way in which the two kinds of domination are intertwined. Resistance to managerial discretion is not just about objecting to arbitrary power as a matter of principle, nor just about challenging a particularly nasty manager. Rather, the point is that, in a modern capitalist economy, the manager’s authority is tied to the problem of exploitation itself. Structurally- dominated workers are not just threatened with exploita- tion at the moment of contract but in the workplace. The core interest of the employer is in extracting as much labor as possible, which is why employers, regardless of whether they are benevolent or cruel, tend to seek unchallenged authority over the work process. Seemingly petty actions, like denying bathroom breaks or imposing dangerous work speeds, are not, on this account, isolated instances of abuse, but rather moments when the structural imper- atives of maximizing profits translate into the exercise of managerial authority and organization of work. Uncon- tested managerial authority is of concern to workers not just because those who have power tend to abuse it, but because this power is directed to a systematic purpose: it is used to exploit workers. These prerogatives are, in effect, a way of unilaterally altering the terms of employment. Threatening to introduce new technology, speed up work, relocate plants, or reduce and redistribute tasks is typically part of an interconnected process in which structural and personal elements of domination fold into each other to guarantee maximum effort for minimum compensation. That is why confining strikes narrowly to issues regarding wages, hours, and conditions is so problematic. Such limitations rely on analytically groundless or morally dubious attempts to derive entrepreneurial authority from the contract, and they fail to understand why managerial prerogatives with respect to hiring, firing, investment, and organization are just as significant to the basic interests of the worker as bread-and-butter issues like wages and hours.76 The worker’s interest in not being subject to continuously arbitrary authority is expansive. The question of compensation cannot be separated from the organization and control over work. Nor can the expansiveness of this interest be reduced to the fact that workers cannot fairly bargain for basic terms if they cannot also contest the wider range of managerial prerogatives. All members of a democratic society have an independent interest in self-rule. They have that latter interest whenever they find themselves in the kind of ongoing, formally coordinated, rule-bound relationships that are backed by coercive law. This is just what a govern- ment is.77 Absent an actually democratic workplace, the right to strike remains a central way for workers to resist these arbitrary forms of authority. Strikes are in many ways superior to protective legislation, labor arbitration, and the courts because those formal processes are slow and can cover only a limited number of issues. Strikes are more immediate, powerful, and reliable ways for workers to contest the employer’s otherwise arbitrary power. In the process of challenging that form of authority they challenge the very idea that they should be seen as mere sellers of their labor-power, with no further interests in liberty. They reject the notion that in making a labor contract they have alienated rights of control over their minds and bodies. He adds: My basic thought is that the right to strike is a right of human freedom claimed against the social domination that the typical modern worker experiences. Ordinarily, the right to strike is thought to be an economic right whose purpose is to maintain a certain kind of bargaining relationship among self-interested economic actors. However, it is better understood as a political right that individuals claim against an unjust system of law and property in the name of justice and emancipation. It is a political right even when most strikes do not have explicitly political ends. Put another way, one reason strikes are political is the way they threaten the normal distinction between politics and economics itself. They do so by challenging the idea that the logic of commodity exchange and private contracts should govern labor relations. The best justification of the right to strike lies in the way strikers claim their liberty not just as abstract persons but as socially-situated agents, who find them- selves in the historically specific relationships of domina- tion associated with the labor market. It is this connection to resisting domination that makes the right to strike political. My central purpose is to develop an argument for the right to strike and in so doing to show how recent developments in political philosophy around concepts like domination and freedom can enrich our thinking about labor rights.14 While basically a normative argu- ment, this is not an argument from what is sometimes called ideal theory. The procedure here is not to imagine the best regime and derive the right to strike from features of that regime—quite the opposite. It would, in fact, be hard to understand just why the strike protects a funda- mental interest in non-domination if we began from perfectly just conditions. As we shall see, we can only make sense of the right to strike—of the interests it protects, of its scope, of the role it plays in our moral reasoning—against the background of injustice. Those unjust conditions of domination explain the right to strike. I make no general claims about the superiority of non-ideal versus ideal theory. Rather, my argument here is narrower: to explain and justify the right to strike, we must begin with the significantly unjust conditions of the typical labor market. | 11/6/21 |
Please ReadTournament: all | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all | 9/11/21 |
SeptOct - Fem AC v 1Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep NP | Judge: Andrew Torrez 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. Deeply ingrained gender bias and stereotypes also lead to behaviours that favour men over women, especially in accessing healthcare. Gender-related limitations through cultural and traditional practices are also factors that can affect women's health and influence their access to healthcare services, facilities and medicines (Ezeah and Achonwa, 2015, p. 47; NPC and ORC Macro, 2004, pp. 39–40, 127–128). These gender-related problems are prevalent in societies that subjugate the social status of women and subject them to harsh traditional medical practices. Examples of adverse cultural practices are Female Genital Mutilation (FGM),4 preferential treatment of male children (Lewu, 2015, p. 227). and differential access to and utilisation of healthcare facilities by men and women in many communities in of some developing countries (Mandara, 2000, pp. 97–98.) In Nigeria, for example, the practice of FGM is largely prevalent in communities that believe the act is necessary to control a female's libido and prevent promiscuity (WHOb). Apart from the psychological torture, this painful circumcision practice exposes women to infections such as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), hepatitis B, as well as the danger of haemorrhage, shock and death (Ayanleye, 2013, p. 131). These gender inequalities can have far reaching consequences on women's health and well-being, consequently, they will need access to medicines. Similarly, religious and cultural practices, such as the purdah system of wife seclusion are also barriers to accessing healthcare by women (Adedini et al., 2014, pp. 341–359; Wall, 1998, pp. 341–359). These practices can prevent women from seeking medical attention when necessary. A gender-based assessment of poverty and a review of the literature on social inequalities and health further suggest that most women, especially in the rural parts of developing countries, experience limited access to health services and resources (Bennett, Dolin, and Blaser, 2014, pp. 1477–1479; O'Donnell, 2007, p. 2827; Sicchia and Maclean, 2006, p. 70). Several factors such as economic hardship, illiteracy and poverty, and so forth, create barriers to access to health treatments (Holmes et al., 2012, p. 11). The lack of economic resources to support the provision of essential health services could significantly contribute to the limited availability and access to quality healthcare and medicines by women (Ojanuga and Gilbert, 1992, p. 614). Although the poor access to healthcare services, facilities and medicines for women is not limited to resources and low income, inaccessibility due to finances and cost of drugs makes it even less likely for women to have access to adequate patented medicines healthcare. As a result of the many factors that obstruct their access to health care, women will require specific attention in the efforts to scale up access to the necessary healthcare treatments and medicines (CESCR, 2000, para 21). 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. | 9/16/21 |
readTournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all | 9/18/21 |
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