On Arriving
Hi. I hope you are having a restful day today. As you scroll through this page and listen to my voice, I will sometimes invite you to pause this audio to engage with other content on the website. You should feel free, though, to pause whenever you feel called to, and to linger on the pictures, videos, poems, or whatever draws your attention in that moment.
And with that, I invite you to take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes for a bit, if you feel called to, and feel inward… a few more deep breaths… what do you feel? Is anything sore? Aching? Are your shoulder muscles tense? Is there a specific part of your body calling your attention? If so, take this moment to slow down, to breathe oxygen into every cell in your being, to listen to what your body is telling you… if you feel called to stretch, meditate, massage anything, I encourage you to do so while listening to the audio below. You can pause here until you finish.
Thank you for being present in your body. I hope the slow, steady crashing of the waves was grounding for you. As you listen, read, and interact with this project, I would like you to keep a few questions at the forefront: What is your body telling you? What do you feel? How is your body reacting? What knowledge is your body communicating to you?
The work I have done throughout this website is as much about embodied knowledge as it is about academic knowledge (and I will continuously invite you to think of one as a variant of the other). To help us frame and arrive at this moment together, I have included a few excerpts from Octavia Raheem’s Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change. You can pause here while you engage with her words (and if you feel called to, you can have the ocean sounds play again while you read and reflect).
How did that feel, to be present in your body? What endings are you beginning? Who or what came to mind when you thought of refuge? When I asked myself these questions for the first time a few months ago, I cried.
As I near the end of my time at Swarthmore, I find it increasingly difficult to remain present and to listen to what my body is telling me. The last few months have been filled with thinking about the future, filling out applications, scholarships, finding housing, finding a part-time job to cover rent in Boston… everything has been focused on what comes after graduation… but graduation isn’t here yet, and I find myself being pulled in a million different directions, trying to stay present and maintain the relationships I’ve built here over the last four years while also figuring out which relationships are going to sustain me after this.
But… deep breaths… let’s stay in the present moment. Today is Monday, April 24th. 2:20 pm. When I first started writing this, it was Wednesday, March 29th. 3:11 pm. I felt… tired, and a bit hungry. I was writing in one of the small rooms in the IC basement. The sun was shining really brightly outside, and I was tempted to go and lay in the amphitheater instead of starting to write, but our senior project drafts were due very soon.
There were bird sounds coming out of my laptop speakers. They help me concentrate. As I looked at my screen, the little bar flashing on and off at the end of my sentences whenever I stopped writing, I was struck with one question: where do I start? This project is the culmination of so many moving fragments, so many different (but also inter-connected) voices… and in all honesty, I feel guilty that I’m not able to give them all their due diligence. Perhaps that is where I should start, then. The things I feel… and to help us arrive there, I’d like to share an excerpt from the personal statement I wrote for my master’s program:
***
“Swarthmore has harmed me. It has given me trauma I am still learning to sit with, and I am not the only one. For four years, I have witnessed the institution burn through the energy and Spirit of so many marginalized students, watched it tire us out until all that remains are shells of our whole beings, left with no capacity to fight back against the erasure of our experiences and emotional labor.
You see, when you hold non-white, non-affluent, non-cisheteronormative identities in a place that was built for people who can neatly check off all those boxes, your entire being exists in a state of tension. You are left navigating two versions of the same reality — an institution that actively recruits diversity without actually responding to the needs of the students who provide said diversity in the first place.”
***
Like many of the people who come to this institution from places that lack wealth and resources, I arrived to this place full of energy. I was excited. Freshman fall was the first time I had been on a train.
It was the first time I had seen more than a couple hundred dollars in my own bank account at once. I joined God knows how many clubs at the activities fair, becoming a first-year intern for half of them within the first few weeks.
As I navigated campus those first few months… I remember occasionally hearing remnants of what had happened the semester before — references to the sit-in and the closing of the frats. I never really understood the whole story, though. In hindsight, my understanding of what had happened was very tangibly shaped by the monopoly this (and other) institutions hold over what histories get remembered.
Though I did not officially start at Swarthmore until Fall 2019, I was actually on campus for DiscoSwat in September 2018 and for SwatLight and SwatStruck in April 2019. These were some of the months where the work of Organizing for Survivors was really picking up. Some of their larger actions were already happening by then…
… and yet despite me being physically on campus, administrators in charge of the programs must have done a really good job strategically scheduling events, because I did not witness any of the work of O4S while I was here.
I remember even in May 2019, when I was back in Texas, a friend who knew I was going to Swarthmore read an article about the frats and came up to me, saying that Swarthmore was full of rapists. In response, I defended the institution, saying something along the lines of “rape happens at all college campuses, at least my college responded and closed down the frats.”
I am pretty disgusted with how I responded at the time… era un mocoso (a little brat), I didn’t know what I was talking about, but when I reflect on that conversation, I feel… I’m almost in disbelief. To think that I was not even an official student at Swarthmore yet, and the institution had already convinced me to defend its name by hiding all of the work O4S had done! It’s actually ridiculous how an institution can have so much influence over one’s perception of truth like that… and it was that line of thinking that led me to this project.
And so, to understand how this moment is happening, right now, this moment where you are witnessing and interacting with the content in this website, I draw briefly from some of Michel Foucault’s theoretical work on genealogy.
In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, which was published in English in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault by Donald F. Bouchard, Foucault writes that “genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history — in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles (Foucault 2021, 139).”
Elaborating on the three Platonic modalities of history, he continues by saying that “… the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory — a transformation of history into a totally different form of time (Foucault 2021, 160).”
Now… that was a lotttt of words… but I’ll let you sit with them for a bit. Mull them over. If you’d like, you can pause here and re-read the paragraphs again. We will come back to these words later.
It’s important to me, as we are thinking through our arrival into this moment, that I share with you how I myself got here… the path that led me to even start thinking about truth-making to begin with. Getting to senior year was a struggle. The four years leading up to this moment were filled with a global pandemic, moving 2,000 miles away from home, multiple life-threatening surgeries, grief, anxiety, depression, organizing to make this place better for future students, heartbreaks, near-divorces… four years filled with the overwhelming feeling of being alive and existing at Swarthmore.
The end of junior year was particularly rough. My body was exhausted, demanding I let it recover from everything that the Vice Presidency of SGO had taken out of me.
My grandpa passed away the day after I got home from Swarthmore that Spring, and my uncle joined him a few weeks later. In between grief, exhaustion, and the uncertainty of everything I was going through, though, I found myself in México City. I had summer research plans that had been in the works for months… I didn’t know how to exist at home when my dad was grieving the loss of his own dad and brother… I myself didn’t know how to grieve… and so I left, hoping to find healing in the country my ancestors had themselves left decades prior.
Instagram Caption 06/10/22
The day after I landed home from Swarthmore, my grandfather passed away. I wasn’t even done with my semester yet… and less than a month later, my uncle has also passed, joining my grandpa wherever it is souls go after they leave our bodies.
It’s been difficult to sit with these emotions. I don’t like being near death; thinking about it gives me anxiety, and my throat gets all knotted up. But I know death isn’t the end.
Earlier today, I read something adrienne maree brown wrote. “We are learning how to grieve without disappearing.” I’ve been thinking about those words since this morning…
I’ve been in Mexico City for more than a week now, and the more time I spend here, the more connected I feel to my roots and to the person I am. Walking these streets, listening to the music of long-lost memories, speaking my language everywhere I go…
When I think about the folks that came before me, I often think about their migration journeys. All the places they’ve been, the places they left behind, the places they dreamed of.
Leaving TX for college was not easy. I carry a heavy feeling with me everywhere I go; missing home, missing my family, missing the community that shaped me into who I am today.
The tattoos I have inked on my skin are reminders of this. They represent my roots, symbols of the journeys of those who came before me and the journeys I have yet to embark on.
I got my newest one two days ago. The Mexican Flag’s eagle, TX’s state flowers, and the ever-migrating butterfly. It’s my story. It’s the story of many of the folks I have come to love in this life.
Please keep my family and I in your prayers as we get through these difficult moments… I am slowly processing everything, learning to grieve without disappearing. I am learning to carry the folks who have left this life as my ancestors… and I am committed to living a life full of joy, full of smiles and laughter and fulfillment.
Committed to life itself. For them; for me; for all of us.
When I got back to campus senior Fall, I felt raw. Email after email said something along the lines of “we hope you feel rejuvenated and rested and happy and joyful after summer break!” I wanted so badly to feel those things, but I was still exhausted, still grieving, still processing. Everyone around me was moving a thousand miles an hour, rushing everywhere faster than they could process the moment they had just left. Perhaps I was also one of those people at one point, but this time I felt utterly outside of that hamster wheel.
This time… this time, I was much more in tune with the pain, grief, and exhaustion I was feeling in my body. I expected my own recognition of this to be mirrored around me, but the opposite seemed true. Classes went on as normal. Exhaustion and burning out were the common themes across our check-ins, and yet we collectively seemed to pretend that things were… fine?
At times, I wanted nothing more than to run into the woods around us and yell out everything I carried inside. Even now, as I’m writing these words, I still feel unable to fully articulate everything… and as I sat with this, feeling this huge disconnect between the trauma my body was reacting to and the lived reality of Swarthmore, I remembered a conversation I had with my friend Jinia.
Late one night, in the basement of the IC — the same place I was in when I started writing this —, we had a long conversation about exhaustion and labor at Swarthmore. “Burnout on this campus is not distributed equally,” we wrote in green Expo marker on the dry erase wall.
It seemed like a revolutionary statement at the time, to put into words what so many of us at this school know deep in our bones: that those with marginalized identities often carry burdens that privileged folks do not. How do we reckon with that? There is no straight-forward answer, at least I have yet to find one. I did, however, have a conversation about this with my friend Darlene in my Healing Praxis and Social Justice class last semester. I invite you to pause here and listen to our conversation below.
Having these conversations, thinking through some of the things I was feeling in community with other folks, I felt a yearning to know if other students before me had felt the same way. Did other people reflect on how exhausted we were? Had others thought about the disconnect between their harm and the institution’s overt push for continued production of labor, knowledge, and academic rankings? Had students before me felt as utterly exhausted and beat down as I did in that moment?
As these questions reverberated through my entire being, I found myself clueless. I had no idea where to begin searching for these answers. The College’s version of history was of no use to me; there was never any explicit mention of the work student organizers had done throughout the years here. There were no upperclassmen for me to lean on, as I was the upperclassman now, and at times it felt like I was the only one on this campus who remembered the work of O4S, S.UP, and other student movements. I found myself… alienated. I felt disconnected from my own experiences, almost as if I was witnessing myself from the third person.
The alienation I was feeling reminded me of something Karl Marx wrote in his manuscripts:
“A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men. … man is alienated from his species-life means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life (Marx 2023, 145).”
And as I was thinking about this, about this alienation I was experiencing with what I carried in my body and how that impacted the ways I moved through Swarthmore… I also remembered Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words in her Antipode Foundation film Geographies of Racial Capitalism.
In the film, Gilmore reminds us that “racial capitalism — which is to say all capitalism — is not a thing, it’s a relation,” going on to describe how the the institutions that govern our daily lives often serve as agents through which the inequality “capitalism requires” is reproduced (Geographies 2020).
As an example, Gilmore talks about the people of Amora in Portugal. She tells us that “the people in Amora discovered that they were at threat of losing their homes, and therefore losing their entire community, because none of their houses were up to code. The municipality, where they’re located, promised that everybody would get a new house, in some social housing project, somewhere, that would be adequate, and people said ‘no no no, you don’t understand. We want to live here, this is our home. Not just the house, this is our home, this community’s our home, we have people and resources here (Geographies 2020).’”
In response to these threats, “people started to organize themselves, not only to save their houses, which was the number one impetus to organizing, but also to understand, well, ‘How come we, of all of the people of greater Lisbon, are under threat of losing our community and our home? What is it about us?’ At the same time, they developed study groups to understand not just about their local vulnerability or how the city government works, that kind of thing, but also about the history of colonialism, the history of racism, the current history of citizenship in the E.U. as it has changed over time, Fortress Europe, all of these things became part of their own study program, and they debate all the time, and they create these institutions (Geographies 2020)’” that Gilmore has termed “pop-up universities.” In her words, “everything that matters to people, we discuss in there.”
Gilmore’s call to conceptualize racial capitalism in all of its capacity for evolution led me to think more critically about the role of institutions in reproducing the inequality, hierarchy, and alienation that capitalism inherently requires.
When I think about institutions as a subject of inquiry, I usually come back to Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, where she reminds us that “responsibility for diversity and equality is unevenly distributed (Ahmed 2012, 4).” But we’ve already talked about the individual, material distribution of labor at Swarthmore… Gilmore’s words made me think less about the labor itself and more about our memory of said labor.
As I mentioned earlier, as I was thinking about the things I was feeling, the burnout, the exhaustion, I wondered if other students had felt the same way before… and I knew from knowledge and stories that had been passed down to me by upperclassmen in years prior that such histories did exist, that students had organized throughout the existence of Swarthmore, but I couldn’t readily find any official College history that centered these types of experiences… and it felt almost like the institution was actively, intentionally erasing the things students have historically lived through at Swarthmore…
… like the people of Amora, whose entire communities — physical places but also memories, connections, relationships — were at risk of being entirely erased. And what this made me realize — and part of what I argue in this work — is that institutions more broadly, as they exist under racial capitalism, reproduce conditions of inequality not just by organizing labor, but by alienating us from the connective tissue that is our memory. We are dismembered from the knowledge, relationships, and resistance that others before us have engaged in, in a way that, as Marx said, results in people that are “alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life (Marx 2023, 144).”
And what I keep coming back to is how the people of Amora responded. In the face of being erased from official history, from the material existence of the municipality they lived in, they chose to create another source of memory, a “counter-memory”, as Foucault called for — a history that centered the knowledge, awareness, and connection they had been deprived of, in direct opposition to the dismemberment of racial capitalism. That was their resistance…
… and as I took deep breaths, feeling every cell in my body vibrate, feeling the shiver of the cold air tingle down my arm, the weight of my shoulders and the ache in my lower back… I came to the conclusion that this dismemberment was part of the harm I was experiencing at Swarthmore… and so, to understand how I am able to produce this knowledge that you are interacting with, why I felt called to focus my project on the work of student organizers… we must frame this project, itself, as an act of anti-capitalist resistance; as an act of creating counter-memory; as an act of healing.
Now, I want to be very specific in how we are thinking about these things, specifically our understanding of healing. To help us arrive there, I invite you to engage with one of adrienne maree brown’s poems, i love my hip, i love my healers.
Let’s let those last few words sink in. “… i think about the million intersections of my body, my wholeness, and the layers of emotion, memory, and joy that reside within me. then i love my hip. and i love my healers. i love my hip.”
During my Healing Praxis and Social Justice class last semester, we often engaged with adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. In one of the earlier classes, we were asked to answer the prompt: “adrienne maree brown describes emergent strategy as an application of the principles of biomimicry and permaculture to movement organizing and community building (p 12 – 13). Can you offer an example of biomimicry or permaculture not provided by brown that you find analogous to the task of social justice? Explain why.”
In response, I chose to the following excerpt from her book:
“Together we must move like waves. Have you observed the ocean? The waves are not the same over and over — each one is unique and responsive. The goal is not to repeat each other’s motion, but to respond in whatever way feels right in your body. The waves we create are both continuous and a one-time occurrence. We must notice what it takes to respond well. How it feels to be in a body, in a whole — separate, aligned, cohesive. Critically connected (brown 2021a, 16).”
I went on to say that, and I’m going to quote my own response here:
“One thing I have been thinking about throughout the last two years at Swarthmore has been the force we draw from for movement-building. I think much of organizing today is detached; from our bodies; from our emotions; from the things we feel inside, the things so holy we can’t communicate with words.
When I was in Made in America yesterday (which I’ll admit is the reason this response is getting submitted today and not yesterday teeeheee), there was a moment when I felt so full of life, connected to every single person in the crowd shaking ass to Bad Bunny’s music. It felt just like amb describes above — separate but aligned, each one of us letting the music guide our individual movements to a shared beat. It felt magical.
We have gotten so caught up debating left and right politics, focusing on programs / policies / ideas / rhetoric that rely on “logic” and “reasoning” without engaging the depth of our senses — without engaging the knowledge embodied in our stretch marks, in our scars, in the tattoos we have inked on our skin.
We feel a certain way when we witness and/or experience harm. That’s a fact. Even if the state does not label said harm as a “crime,” our bodies tell us when something is wrong. We feel it. Our connection with spirit remains ingrained in us even when we’ve been socialized to forget its existence, and it often manifests itself in our visceral reactions.
What happens when we remember what joy feels like not at an intellectual level, but deep within us, in our genes, our cells, in the ways our muscles move when we experience laughter? What happens when the end goal of our organizing is to create the conditions needed for our bodies to feel this visceral joy (rather than, say, organizing with the end goal of winning an election)?
My answer is that the driving force behind our organizing changes. We no longer move and create from anger; we stop imagining our futures as simply in opposition to something. Anger is a powerful emotion, and it has its place in our existence; but moving from a place of joy — in and of itself a radical thing to do, given that the systems we live in work endlessly to prevent us from feeling it — allows us to imagine and create things outside of the reality we live in.
Going back to the prompt, I am drawn to the phrase “the task of social justice.” To me, that’s where the work ahead lies. Social justice should not feel like a “task”; it should be something we enjoy! Organizing should be a space of joy, laughter, dancing, and shaking ass. We have to open ourselves to connection. We all move and dance in different ways, but we share the same beat, and remembering that viscerality is what we needa do if we are to create the worlds we want to live in (Hernandez 2022).”
You will see a lot of what I wrote in this response resonate across the rest of this website (again, thinking about embodied and academic knowledge as variants of each other), but for now, I’d like to focus on one of the phrases I wrote all those months ago: “We feel a certain way when we witness and/or experience harm. That’s a fact. Even if the state does not label said harm as a “crime,” our bodies tell us when something is wrong. We feel it. Our connection with spirit remains ingrained in us even when we’ve been socialized to forget its existence, and it often manifests itself in our visceral reactions.”
When I think about the journey of healing, I often come back to that word: spirit. Though I’ve engaged with it in various contexts, I resonate the most with the way Gloria Anzaldúa uses it in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. She writes:
“Spirituality is an ontological belief in the existence of things outside the body (exosomatic), as opposed to the belief that material reality is a projection of mentally created images. The answer to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it?” is yes. Spirituality is a symbology system, a philosophy, a worldview, a perspective, and a perception. Spirituality is a different kind and way of knowing. It aims to expand perception; to become conscious, even in sleep; to become aware of the interconnections between all things by attaining a grand perspective. A source reality exists, and both physical and nonphysical worlds emanate from it, forming a secondary reality (Anzaldúa 2015, 38).”
She goes on to say that “when you catch glimpses of this invisible primary reality and realize you’re connected to it, feelings of alienation and hopelessness disappear. Coming to terms with spirit means bringing yourself into harmony with the world within and around you. One finds one’s way to spirit through woundings, through nature, through reading, through actions, through discovering new approaches to problems (Anzaldúa 2015, 38).”
One of Anzaldúa’s most prominent theoretical contributions on healing was also her development of autohistoria-teoría, which she conceptualized to “create a possibility that expands beyond autobiography and cultural narratives (Bhattacharya 2020, 199).” She wanted to “include dreams, visions; prayers, journeying to other realms of consciousness, dialoguing with animals, spirit, and ancestors, and other nontangible experiences that could be privileged and centered in autoethnographic and other narratives in academia,” arguing that “such nontangible experiences are legitimate and inform our thoughts and actions in material forms (Bhattacharya 2020, 199).”
Anzaldúa’s work has since been expanded upon by other scholars, including Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya from the University of Florida, who writes that “since Anzaldúa is not situated in educational research, her notion of autohistoria-teoría permits [her] to feel unrestricted by any particular genre within and outside of education and academia (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).”
Dr. Bhattacharya explains that what attracted her to autohistoria-teoría was that it expanded how she thought about autoethnography, allowing her to “exceed the realms of this world, and bring in the world [she] has always known — a world of contemplation, mindfulness, and journeying into other realms (Bhattacharya 2020, 199).” For her, this “freedom from adhering to a truth limited to verifiability” allowed her “to combine fact, fiction, dreams, desires, visions, and meditative insights (Bhattacharya 2020, 199).”
Importantly, Dr. Bhattacharya also reminds us that “Anzaldúa considered herself a shaman, and forwarded the idea that when we experience trauma, our soul splits in multiple fragmented parts (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).” In conversation with Dr. AnaLouise Keating, Dr. Bhattacharya has described these fragmentations as “provoking emotional, geographic, economic, spiritual, philosophical, familial, professional, and other forms of exile as we are separated and labeled: too feminist/not feminist enough, too queer/not queer enough, too radical/not radical enough, etc (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).” They caution that “when we internalize these labels, we reinforce this process. Carrying these fragmentations in our bodies, spirits, and beings, we imprint their narratives in our consciousness. At times we refuse to acknowledge them; at other times we simply forget their presence; and at still other times we over-identify with one or two fragments while entirely ignoring the rest (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).”
Lots of words… healing, fragments, counter-histories… truth.
All of these things swirled through my mind… they sounded like ocean waves crashing into each other, never letting the other completely finish before forming a new wave that in turn crashed into three more, with new questions coming out of every swirl.
How could I remember what student organizers before me had felt? How could I create an alternative memory, one that resisted racial capitalism’s dismemberment by centering the sentiments, the “love, conscience, instincts (Foucault 2021, 139)” of all those who had struggled here before me? How could I begin to heal the harm so many of us experience, putting our (my) fragments back together?
It was these things — the things I was witnessing in and outside of my body — that led me to this project. I knew there many histories, voices, fragments that had been forgotten with the passage of time, the institution itself unable to keep up with the ever-increasing rate of staff turnover. I knew, from experience, that we as students tended to document our movements through Facebook pages and Voices articles… and so, late in the Fall semester of my senior year, I began the research that led to this website.
The Research
At first, I was focusing on five student movements and groups: the movement against the Chamberlain Project, Swarthmore Students for Universal Pass (S.UP), the FLI Council, the Black Affinity Coalition (BAC), and Organizing for Survivors (O4S). I chose these voices because these were all movements I had, in one way or another, witnessed during my time at Swarthmore, so it felt right for me to start there.
After an initial search to see what I could find, I decided to focus the beginning of my research on the work of Organizing for Survivors. It was the group I was able to find the most content for — their Facebook page was filled with videos, articles, statements, and pictures of their work, some of the content going back as far as 2013. I found myself digging through years of posts, VOICES articles, College documents, reflections… and as I looked through all of these voices…
… I found myself asking even more questions than I had begun with. What did these organizers feel? How did they use affective and subjective claims to truth as a way to mobilize people around them, as a way to actively create their own counter-history? How were they able to transmit those feelings to people who weren’t present in that moment, both physically but also in time? What does it mean for me — for you — to witness their work years after their last Facebook post, outside of their time but within the same physical spaces they occupied? What does it mean for me to feel the pain, anger, frustration, and exhaustion they expressed very viscerally in my own body, in this present moment? How did their claims to truth differ from the objectivity of the institution, who hired third-party investigators solely for “fact-finding” purposes?
To answer these questions, I draw from Raffaella Fryer-Moreira’s work in We Were There: Rethinking Truth with Midiativistas in Rio de Janeiro.
In the article, Fryer-Moreira describes the work of midiativistas, “media activists who produced audiovisual testimony from the front lines of protests” during the popular uprisings in Brazil between 2013 and 2014. She argues that their reports “were grounded in their act of ‘being there’ and bearing witness”, emphasizing the “affective encounters that their position made possible (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 18).” She also states that “their first-hand accounts were situated, partial, and deemed more convincing because they rejected the mainstream media’s claims to ‘objective truth’” in favor of “situated truth, witnessed directly, unsettling traditional divisions between representation and reality, and questioning the conditions (and relations) through which knowledge is produced (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 18).”
Raffaella further emphasizes that the work of midiativistas was “seen to be truthful and authoritative because they were made by insiders who ‘were there’ – whose physical proximity to the site of action and relational position within the protest movement enabled them to produce first-hand audiovisual testimony that was transparent about its partial and situated claims to truth (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 19).” She also contextualizes her own blurred role as an ethnographer/participant by acknowledging that she “was one of the six midiativistas who filmed and edited” these videos, standing as “an index of [her] presence as ethnographer, and the ethnographic choices [she] made which positioned [her] on the front line of the protest that day, being there and doing with with [her] collaborators (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 20).”
Most importantly, Fryer-Moreira states that the videos produced were “made through the collaborative effort of six midiativistas, whose situated insider positions in the protest space permitted the perspectives of six cameras to coalesce into one video report, offering a window into what the streets looked like from where they stood,” thus arguing these reports as “an artefact of both midiativista knowledge and anthropological knowledge (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 20).” Again, going back to the invitation to think about subjective, embodied knowledge and academic knowledge as variants of each other.
Now, when I looked at the work that O4S had done all those years ago through the ethnographically informed research paradigms Raffaella calls for, I came to three conclusions.
Conclusion #1: Witnessing Counter-Memory
The first thing I concluded is that O4S organizers, although maybe not consciously using this framework, actively did the work of creating a counter-memory through their organizing. Like the people of Amora that Ruth Wilson Gilmore described in her film, these organizers were intentional in remembering the histories, stories, and fragments that the College did not readily include in its official history. They often leaned on these fragments to strengthen their work, referencing them in statements, speeches, and published articles, resisting dismemberment and erasure by explicitly demanding “Swarthmore, don’t forget me.”
I also concluded that, at least in the case of O4S, students mobilized their counter-histories through mediums such as Facebook, Tumblr, videos, images, and published statements, which became technologies that allowed them to extend their claims to truth outside of the physical, immediate protest sites. It was their use of these technologies that allowed people who weren’t present in that moment to witness what they were witnessing; to feel what they were feeling, the embodied knowledge the College tried so hard to erase.
You can witness this in the comments people left on the O4S facebook page, in the strategizing and collaboration O4S did with other groups advocating for survivors across the country, and in the many letters alumni released in support.
It was ultimately these technologies, centering the subjective and affective, that enabled their work — their counter-history — to reach across space and time, calling to me as I began the work of gathering my own fragments to create the counter-history that would further my own healing journey.
Conclusion #2: Assembling Fragments
The second thing I realized goes back to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s wise words. “All liberation struggle is place-based liberation struggle. It is specific to the needs and the struggles of people where they are, and that where has many dimensions (Geographies 2020).”
Her words reminded me of another poem by adrienne maree brown…
When I started this project, I assumed I would be working on five different, individual groups and movements. I thought I would be able to neatly separate everything into its own little box… and yet the more of O4S’s work I witnessed, the more I realized that this was impossible. These categories of separation, of individualizing every little thing, was not descriptive of what I was witnessing, and in fact, it only reproduced the dismemberment I was trying to resist. There was no singular “O4S” voice that I could isolate… the ideological concept of O4S as a singular body was actually composed of many different voices in conversation with each other, always moving, always interacting, always working to create an adaptive, malleable narrative that was specific to their moment and time.
… and again, you can see this for yourself in the many different student groups who released letters of support for O4S’s demands, and in the words of O4S organizers, who often interweaved their claims to truth with the struggles of other student groups. You can even witness this in the Swat Fraternities Blog Tumblr page, which included dozens of individual student voices.
I concluded, then, that I could not separate these fragments… because it’s only by situating these different subjective, individual voices together that these organizers were able to articulate a counter-memory to the “objective” truth the College put forth.
When I arrived at this realization, I remembered something adrienne maree brown wrote in “We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice.” She said “the fractal nature of our sacred design teaches us that our smallest choices today will become our next norms (brown 2021b, 3).”
I wanted to read more of her writing on fragments, and so I browsed through her blog until I came across this excerpt from a speech she gave at the opening for the Allied Media conference in 2013.
It struck me, then, that the work of O4S, while made up of many different voices, was, in and of itself, a fragment. Like the dandelions adrienne describes, the work of student organizers moves through space and time, leaving seeds in different places that allow for different fragments and claims to truth to be situated in different contexts. One must only take a look at this project to see this, and to realize that this work — creating counter-memories that resist erasure — is also the work of place-based liberation struggle that Ruth Wilsom Gilmore describes.
And as I’m seeking to understand my own experience at Swarthmore by witnessing the work of so many students before me, I am realizing that the seeds — the fragments — of O4S have been with me all along. They were here in the voices of the upperclassmen I leaned on during my early years at Swarthmore. They were in the organizing tactics they taught me, tactics they themselves had successfully employed during their prior work. They were in the advice I received, in the responses I got when I reached out to folks asking for support on organizing. They are here, in this very website.
They’re in this project. The work of Organizing for Survivors was my entry point into this research, but I always had the intention of expanding beyond O4S and including other movements. As the deadline for our senior project drew closer and closer, though, and as I found myself unable to separate individual voices away from O4S… I felt a need to put this website together in a way that articulated the specificity of Swarthmore’s counter-histories, how all of these different fragments fit together not as stagnant puzzle pieces, but as adaptive, ever-interacting relationships that in turn create new possibilities for truth-making and resisting erasure.
That is why the main page of this website is made up of mismatched squares… because this project itself should be understood as a fragment made up of other fragments, assembled together with a specific vision of the future… a future that has been envisioned for generations before me.
Conclusion #3: Ethnographically-Informed Future-Making
The third and final thing I concluded from delving into the work of O4S is that employing Fryer-Moreira’s call for an ethnographically informed research paradigm leads me back to concepts I have invited you to reflect on throughout this page: that embodied and academic knowledge can be variants of one another, and that the work of counter-memories and resisting erasure can move through space and time.
Rafaella states that “midiativistas showed [her] that all observation is a form of action, and the scope of our actions shape the scope of what we can know (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 20.” She also distinguishes the “witness-by-chance, who happens to find themselves in a position to witness a situation” from a “witness-by-choice, who makes an intentional decision to put themselves in situations where they think a witness – especially one equipped with a camera – may be needed (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 25).”
For her, “the decision to run towards, rather than away from, was also a defining moment in [her] research. It was a decision to be a midiativista, and occupy the protest space in a way a midia- tivista does, and consequently it was a decision to be an ethnographer, committed to ‘being there’ and ‘doing with’ with [her] collaborators, and placing [herself] in the spatial and relational position required for knowledge (Fryer-Moreira 2021, 25).”
Again… lots of words… let’s sit with them for a second…
… “all observation is a form of action, and the scope of our actions shape the scope of what we can know.” When I read these words the first time, they sounded hauntingly like VOICES, the student publication at Swarthmore where I got a lot of the content for this website from. Under their Who We Are section, they write that “Voices, founded in the fall of 2017, is a daily, student-run news and media publication that witnesses, teaches, and listens to the multiple truths of Swarthmore. All news and media is deeply political, and the creation of Voices was as well. This is the story of how and why Voices was created (Our History).”
… multiple truths… multiple fragments…
Though this project started from the things I was feeling within my body, it has become much more than that; it has become an articulation of all of the different fragments — the different truths — that can be assembled to create the future so many of us have envisioned. It is a continuation…
… it is a continuation of Kerry Sonia, who envisioned her avoidance of student activism during 2019 as “a step in my own journey of healing, as a reminder that I should not feel guilty. As a reminder that my healing is radical, it is a part of O4S in its own quiet way. For as I stand in the shadows of the student activists who stand in the public, I am healing and witnessing my strength (Sonia 2019).”
… it is a continuation of STAR’s invitation to envision another future with them, asking us “What would it mean to invest in our communities instead of the punitiveness and violence of the state? Swarthmore identifies itself as a ‘Sanctuary campus,’ but what would it mean for Swarthmore to be a Freedom Campus? How can we move away from reproducing the punitiveness that we see in the rest of the world? We must create space for envisioning other ways of being and loving (Students 2019).”
… it is a continuation of the rage and solidarity of the Black Affinity Coalition, when they demanded the future so many students before them had fought for.
… it is a continuation of Shelby Dolch’s vision for a future where they would not be forgotten, demanding “Swarthmore, don’t forget me — don’t forget me because I will not forget you. I won’t forget the silences and all of the times you treated us like we were worthless. They are ingrained into my memory. I will never be silent. I will fight for myself and my friends until Swarthmore is a safe institution for everyone (Dolch 2018).”
… it is a continuation of healing.
I pursued this project because of my experiences organizing at Swarthmore; it was the exhaustion, the pain, and the anger I felt throughout these last four years that brought me here… and it brings me back to emphasizing that this knowledge you are engaging with, you listening to my voice right now… it is not academic or embodied knowledge; it is both. The stress I often feel about my family’s financial situation; the exhaustion I have been feeling ever since leaving student government; the visceral guilt I feel at not having the capacity to include more voices in this project; it is all in here, permeating through each of my phrases, resonating with every word I speak.
When I tune into my body… when I pause in between writing to feel inward, under the ink that marks the outer layer of my skin… I feel the bruises; the harm of the last four years… but I also find strength in remembering that when “I touch my own skin,” it “tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle (brown 2019, 178).”
You know… I do believe being alive in and of itself is something sacred, holy, a miracle, as adrienne maree brown describes it; but we also begin to experience harm before we are even born. Our parents’ stress and trauma is passed down to us in DNA alterations (you can look up epigenetics and read more about this if you’d like, but I can’t take the time to go deeper into that because this thesis is literally due like, yesterday). But… in a way, we (and by we I mean all of us as human beings) co-exist as fragments literally our entire lives, pieces of us lingering in different places, different moments, different times.
When we think of ourselves in this way, as we exist in relation to each other and not solely as individuals, the way we think about healing changes. For me, this project was a manifestation of my own healing journey; but its implications are far beyond the boundaries of my own skin. As I engaged with this work, looking for the feelings, emotions, and experiences of the counter-history I was trying to create, I re-experienced (and in some ways, exacerbated) much of the harm I had already gone through during my time at Swarthmore. Not only was I re-living my own harm, I was also witnessing the harm of other students generations before me. Choosing to witness and re-witness these harms, a “witness-by-choice” as Fryer-Moreira called it, was not easy… but it was necessary for the type of healing I envision.
As Dr. Bhattacharya reminds us, “centering a healing agenda within justice work” is vital because “any engagement in justice work is an engagement with personal and collective trauma,” and “daily immersion in such work creates fatigue and corrosion of one’s soul (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).” If we are to (re)member, then, in resistance to racial capitalism’s dismembering, then we must assemble our fragments, our multiple truths, in collective ways; because healing, in the specificity of this place-based struggle, is inherently anti-capitalist, and it requires us to think at scales beyond the individual and toward the collective…
… and so I chose to commit to this work, to healing, for me… but also for those beyond me.
Now, I want to be clear about a couple of things, because I don’t want my vision of healing to be misinterpreted. I believe that healing, at least as I envision it, is inherently anti capitalist, rejects individualism, and is scaled toward the collective. I also believe that at times, working toward healing collectively demands individual harm. It is a sacrifice some of us must make… but we should not exhaust ourselves for this work.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore says she goes down a path “of trying to think locally in order to think about how today, given the catastrophe of racial capitalism on a world scale, its particular form of austerity, and neoliberalism, and permanent war that we struggle through, requires an approach to solving problems that however particular and local they are, has an international dimension because it is an international problem (Geographies 2020).”
Here, she is inviting us to think local in order to solve global… and so, if we start with our bodies as the site of liberation, of truth-making, of (re)membering our history… then bringing the futures we envision to fruition, working toward collective healing, requires that we embody what those futures feel like in our own very skin. Yes, it requires sacrifice at times, but it also requires rest, sleep, love, and divesting from capitalism, divesting from eternal production, divesting from the extractive ways of relating to each other that have become ingrained in our lived realities.
This is the work of (re)membering, then… remembering the miracle before the harm, remembering the connection before the dismemberment, remembering that we can, in this present moment, access the embodied futures we envision… remembering histories in the places we have been told are ahistorical.
Because, here’s the thing. As racial capitalism evolves and adapts with the passage of time, institutions evolve and adapt with it. Their tactics of dismemberment will change to remain unnoticed. And, in the case of Swarthmore, institutions will even go as far as pretending to remember… but never (re)membering…
Let’s ask ourselves, what is being remembered? More importantly, for what purpose? What is being left forgotten? In their ever-expanding evolution, institutions will sometimes do the work of remembering… but they will only remember within the scope of the conditions that enable racial capitalism’s reproduction; they will never (re)member the voices of students whose embodiment threatens institutional monopoly over perceptions of truth…
… and, you know, I know I’ve shared a lot of quotes from adrienne maree brown throughout this page, but I just think she’s a genius, and her work has really been life-changing for me… and so, I’m going to share another of her wise phrases in We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. She says “I know that ending harm may be far off yet, even unimaginable, but I also believe that the future is already alive in each of us, because all the generations to come live within the bodies, cultures, dreams, and shaping of those alive today (brown 2021b, 159).”
… and when I think of the erasure many of us are facing across the multiple institutions we engage with in our daily lives… I feel a really strong call to resist… because unless we resist this erasure with every breath we take, with every laugh we share, with every connection we make… we will never (re)member the miracle that exists in our future.
On Endings
Today is May 6th. It’s been over a month since I first started writing. Seeing this project come to fruition has been, and continues to be, quite the journey… I did not think or write about all of this in one day, or even in one place. Pieces of this were written in the IC. Others were written in the Women’s Resource Center, with my friend Kestrel quietly working on her own thesis behind me. Even other sections of this were originally voice memos, recorded while I walked through Crum Woods…
… and as we near the end of this voice recording, I find myself thinking about beginnings, middles, and ends… and I’m reflecting on how this website itself is the culmination of different fragments, my past, present, and future selves thinking through and interacting with each other across space and time…
… and I have tried to intentionally write this in a way that will disrupt how we perceive time and space, an invitation to slow down and experience everything in and around us. Now, I obviously have no way of knowing how you’ll individually experience this voice recording and this website more broadly. That depends on the multiple truths you carry in your own body… but my intention was to practice slowing down, to engage us in the act of embodiment as resistance. It was my attempt to engage you with moving, quite literally, against capitalism’s reckless speeding… an invitation to move at the speed of trust.
I was first introduced to the concept of the speed of trust my freshman year, when we were organizing for Universal Pass at the height of the pandemic. Before I became actively involved in organizing, before we launched the campaign you can still witness on the S.UP Facebook page, there were two Black upperclassmen and one other student from my class year who had begun the work of drafting and sendings emails to administration.
I won’t say their names here because I don’t know whether they want to be associated with this work so publicly — especially since some of them graduated years ago — but when the College administration responded to those students’ initial emails by saying they weren’t going to change the grading policies, I became desperate. I felt a sense of urgency, a need to move quickly and mobilize students before the semester ended, before it was too late…
… and in that rush to get things going as quickly as possible, I caused harm. I had heard from the student in my class year that after the administration’s response, they (the initial three student organizers) felt too burnt out to continue organizing…
… and rather than reaching out to the other two students — the two Black upperclassmen — directly, rather than building a relationship and ensuring that the work they had begun was not taken for granted, that we continued their work in a sustainable, inclusive way… I rushed things.
A few of us who had capacity to organize got together, launched the Facebook page, and used the name those other students had created, Swarthmore Students for Universal Pass (S.UP), to represent ourselves. While our intention was not to erase the work of those initial three students, but rather to build on it, our decisions in those early moments had a different impact; we effectively reproduced the very dismemberment and erasure we were trying to fight back against.
Those two Black upperclassmen eventually reached out to us, letting us know of the harm we had caused, and they then became a part of the larger core organizing group. We apologized and tried to hold ourselves accountable, but even then, there was still miscommunication, there was still a lack of trust, there was still tension in all of our meetings… and all of this was happening while we were each trying to survive a global pandemic.
Though I already apologized to them all those years ago… I want to take a moment, in this work, to say that I am sorry. I am sorry for the harm I caused back then, and for any harm, really, that I may have caused through my organizing during the last four years…. because this shit… this world of organizing, of building sustainable movements, of nurturing the connections that build genuine solidarity while also being a full-time student and having all of these other responsibilities on your shoulders… it’s fucking hard.
It was hard for me to navigate my own identities, existing in all of these different places at once, being kicked off the stability of campus mid-semester, struggling at home, taking care of my own mental health, literally fighting tooth and nail just to make it through alive, and then on top of that, being put in a position where I felt forced to organize as quickly as possible just so that other students could survive at this place…
… and though I believe that we have to hold ourselves accountable for the harm we cause, I think it’s important that we also reflect on how it’s a lot easier to blame ourselves, to blame individual actors for shortfalls and failures, rather than to look beyond that, at a bigger scale, and recognize that the systems we live under literally control so much more than we think them to.
Because none of those fuck-ups, none of that harm we caused each other, none of that would have happened had the institution responded favorably to that initial email. We would not have been forced to organize; we would not have been forced to fight each other figuring out what was the best way to convince the College to change their grading policies; we would not have been forced to bear harm for the greater collective…
… and as I arrive at these realizations, I want to take this moment to thank Tiffany Wang ‘21. She… many of you interacting with this website didn’t have a chance to meet her before she graduated… but if I were to go into all of the good work she did throughout her time at Swarthmore, this voice recording would be too large for the website to store. You’ll see some of her work throughout the different fragments, but I want to take this moment and thank her because in the midst of the mess that was S.UP, she was the one that first introduced me to the concept of the speed of trust. She held space for that younger fragment of myself — that freshman that was still learning how to navigate institutions with wealth and power — to air his frustrations, to vent about how fucked up everything was, to really… just listen to the things I was carrying with me.
She also was the one that (re)minded me of how connected our struggle was… that so many people had existed here before me, had felt the frustration I was feeling, had fucked up and caused harm to people as they attempted to make existing at this institution more bearable…
… and I also want to thank Dr. Jenn Phuong, a Visiting Assistant Professor in Ed Studies here at Swarthmore.
In March of this year, various groups across the college collaborated on a “Body Liberation Week.” To quote one of their emails, “the purpose of Body Liberation Week is two-fold: to critically examine how bodies are subject to and regulated by systems of power; and to promote opportunities for nourishing and celebrating our bodies when and where we can!”
As part of the programming, I was invited to be a panelist in a conversation titled “Cultural Perspectives of the Body” with Professor Ghannam, who happens to be one of my thesis advisors, and with Professor Phuong.
It was a really powerful conversation, I think, but I specifically keep coming back to something Dr. Phuong said that day. I had just finished talking about slowing down and choosing rest as a way to honor my ancestors, and in response, she said something along the lines of “some of us have bodies that force us to slow down; we do not have a choice,” referencing her own experience with long-COVID.
I have been sitting with her words ever since that day… because one of the things that I have almost unconsciously avoided reflecting on or talking about in the work that I do is just that: my own experience living with the aftermath of COVID.
For the last three years, I have experienced changes in my body that I am still learning to comprehend. I can’t really describe to you what it feels like… but it’s almost like, this eternal fatigue, lots of brain fog, struggling to focus and get work done in ways that I did not struggle before the pandemic…
… it’s walking around campus, seeing the ghost of freshman me running around from meeting to meeting, making it to class right on time even though I had left my dorm room 3 minutes before… and then coming back to my present, where my body aches for oxygen after slowly climbing up Magill Walk, my temples pulsing with pressure, wanting to break free from the boundaries of my skin…
… it’s experiencing a deep connection with the Crum Woods, slowly walking through its paths and dipping my feet in its creeks… while also feeling disconnected from those around me, who walk and climb through at a pace I cannot keep up with.
… and I have to reckon with that, right, like… this healing, laying down, resting, embodied anti-capitalism… I didn’t arrive at this outside of the context that is my body; I arrived here with my body, in my body.
Sometimes, honestly, I’m thankful… and I don’t say this to excuse the organized abandonment, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it, of those of us most vulnerable during the pandemic; but… sometimes I do wonder if I would have slowed down in the ways I did, if I would have come to believe in embodiment as resistance, had my body not forced me to do so…
… and that’s what this project ultimately is. It’s a manifestation of the healing I have done and the healing I have yet to do; a manifestation of the harm some of our bodies make the sacrifice of sustaining in order to move us, collectively, further along on our journey toward liberation… but it is also a call for all of you engaging with this work to recognize that the institutions and systems governing our everyday lives are liable for the harm we experience, too.
A call to recognize that our envisioning of a liberated future must include one that is filled with anti-capitalist institutions, ones that facilitate the definition of justice I described in Healing Praxis and Social Change: “an active process through which we reconcile with harm, both done and received, in which we envision and create an equitable world where one day healing won’t be necessary (Hernandez 2022).” Because isn’t that the goal? To one day have nothing left to heal from?
bell hooks once said that “only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us (hooks 2022).”… and as the end of this project gets closer, I remain committed, against everything this world has ever thrown at me, to living with an open heart — a heart filled with love.
Love for my healers. Love for the people who taught me that “autoethnographic work, be it traditional, critical, or Anzaldúan, offers healing possibilities (Bhattacharya 2020, 200).” Love for the Ethnic Studies mantra “know history, know self” / “no history, no self.” Love for the feminist scholars who so brilliantly captured what embodied resistance is when they said that “the personal is political.”
Love for Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whom reminds us that “we have to be attentive to the many many different kinds of factors, institutions, places, and processes through which people come to consciousness through fomenting liberation struggle (Geographies 2020).” Because for me, this was it. This was how I arrived at my consciousness… through the harm this institution brought me, through the embodiment I resisted with, through the voices, fragments, feelings, tears, and joy of all of those who have struggled at Swarthmore before me.
And to them… I promise I won’t forget. I will not forget all of the Black, Indigenous, Brown, Queer, Disabled, Neurodivergent, First-Generation, Low-Income, DACAmented, Undocumented, and other marginalized people who have labored to make this institution a better place. I will not forget all of the voices I have had the privilege to witness here, and all of the ones I will never have the opportunity to. I will not forget the people who are forced to practice existence as resistance, all the people whose hearts are too big to be confined by any border, both physical and not, all the people that have helped me get through my four years here. I will not forget myself… I promise I’ll (re)member.
… and so I leave this website here, this project, as a fragment. It is my hope that, like the dandelions adrienne maree brown describes, this fragment lands where it needs to, making space for others — for you, listening to my voice right now — to continue finding and adding fragments to the work I started here, and to use the lessons so many of us have learned across the years as you continue the work of collective healing.
Thank you for listening… I really do mean it when I say that I love you… and I leave you now with how we started… deep breaths…
