Celebrating Disability Pride

This week in North Philly Notes, Eileen Bellemore and Kirsten Behling, two of the coauthors of Disability Services in Higher Education, write about promoting equal access for disabled students.

July is Disability Pride Month, a time to recognize disability as an important part of our diverse identities. It provides an opportunity to share in the pride that disabiled individuals bring to our communities. But as we take this time to support those with disabilities, it is also important to acknowledge that the disabled community is often overlooked, undervalued, and excluded.

Although significant progress has been made since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law 33 years ago today, there is still much work to be done. This month is an opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness of the many ways in which people with disabilities enrich our lives, but it’s also a time to assess how we can become more accessible and inclusive in our thoughts, actions, and environments. Disability Services in Higher Education: An Insider’s Guide focuses on the important role that disability services professionals play as agents of change, working tirelessly to promote full and equal access for disabled students in higher education.

This unique resource provides theoretical and practical content that promotes understanding of the disability services field and encourages discussions to enhance accessibility and inclusivity in higher education. And it provides an assortment of acronyms as well as insights from five authors with 70 years of collective experience in supporting students with disabilities.

Support for college students with disabilities is legally required under the ADA. However, there is no standard blueprint for this complex work. Disability Services in Higher Education provides this blueprint for a wide audience, including new and seasoned professionals, faculty and institutional partners, K-12 educators, and college consultants.

Part one provides an overview of how institutions serve students with disabilities and acknowledges that disability service offices vary widely in staff experience, institutional buy-in, philosophies, and resources.

The second part of the book takes a macro- and micro-level view of the field, looking at office structure and location, staffing levels, models of service provision, spaces we occupy, budgets, onboarding new staff, records management, and guidance on how to advocate for additional resources. We provide a comprehensive analysis of disability as a social construct and as a complicated and often misunderstood identity. We explore historical models of examining disability, language, and identity development, and how we can facilitate their positive development. Additionally, we discuss how embracing disability culture reduces discrimination while promoting inclusion and justice.

In part three, we focus on the interactive process by first providing an overview of the legal, philosophical, and logistical changes that occur during the transition from high school to college. We then discuss the foundational underpinnings of establishing disability and understanding the documentation practices for identifying functional limitations, structuring the intake interview, and making reasonable determinations. In addition, we offer guidance on implementing accommodations and the importance of continued interaction with relevant constituents. Specific categories of accommodation are explored in relation to barrier removal, and we have included a chapter on assistive technology and auxiliary aids that is easily understood. We discuss our role as case managers in coordinating services with other campus providers and monitoring students’ performance throughout their lifecycle. Finally, an entire chapter is dedicated to working with faculty to help them navigate accommodations, from those who are too accommodating to those who struggle to understand the basic premise of access.

Part four focuses on compliance and how legal cases influence policies, processes, and procedures. We aim to make the grievance process less daunting by walking through the complaint process at the institutional and federal levels. We also highlight some well-known legal cases and their resolutions.

In part five, we delve into the concept of inclusion in design, examining its impact on both physical and digital environments and illuminating how design has the power to include or exclude. We explore laws and standards related to inclusion and provide options for meeting or surpassing them. Additionally, we dedicate an entire chapter to universal design, with guidance on encouraging stakeholders to embrace this approach throughout their campuses.

Part six reflects on the insights gained and looks ahead to future considerations as we work towards achieving full inclusion.

In addition, Disability Services in Higher Education is unique in that each chapter begins with thought-provoking questions that aid in learning, while reflective exercises are provided at the end of each chapter. These exercises include real-world scenarios.  Additionally, we offer customizable forms, checklists, training materials, letters, and policy examples. These are freely available and can be used immediately.

As we celebrate disability pride, we hope our book serves as a catalyst for enhancing operational practices and advancing disability rights. It’s our way of honoring and celebrating the intrinsic worth and meaningful contributions individuals with disabilities bring to our society.

Recovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid

This week in North Philly Notes, Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, reflects on why he no longer identifies as “pro-Israel.”

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In the early 1990s, I worked at Tikkun Magazine, then the leading liberal-left American Jewish journal. As a young American Jew whose views on Israel had recently become much more critical, I was especially attracted to a forum that challenged Israel’s occupation from an alternative “pro-Israel” perspective. Under Michael Lerner’s leadership, Tikkun provided a much-needed challenge to the American Jewish establishment on Jewish moral responsibility and ethics. I proudly aligned my critical scrutiny with a vision invested in the long-term welfare of Israel and the Jewish people at large. We were the bona fide pro-Israel Jews, while groups such as AIPAC and the ADL, who reflexively defended Israeli actions, were the false champions.

Up through the first part of the 2000s, I faithfully proclaimed my pro-Israel sentiments even as I raised more severe challenges. But like a growing number of Jews committed to justice and solidarity with the oppressed, I have stopped calling myself pro-Israel or Zionist. To begin with, the appeal to an alternative pro-Israel program is decidedly inadequate for confronting Israel’s depravities over the past two decades. As confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid state where Jewish supremacy prevails in both the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It now has a Kahanist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, with links to Jewish terrorists, as finance minister, whose mandate extends to the occupied territories. Ben-Gvir opened his tenure by ordering a ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag and approving harsher crackdowns of protests. Not to be outdone, Smotrich opined that the West Bank town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after it had just been subjected to settler violence. These trends confirm the haunting assessment in 2016 by the recently departed Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell:

We are at the height of an erosion process of the liberal values in which our society is based. Those who regard liberal values as a danger to the nation, the homeland and the Jewish state are the ones currently in power. They are striving to delegitimize the left and anyone who does not hold the view that conquering the land and settling it through the use of force are the fundamental foundations of Zion.

Furthermore, unlike Sternhell or Peter Beinart, I find no solace in Israel’s foundational principles. As I review in my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism, any liberal values were dwarfed by a commitment to converting a territory that had long been overwhelmingly Arab to a hegemonic Jewish state where the Arab presence was inherently suspect. This is not to say that Israel’s current status inevitably followed from its foundation. Suffice it to note that Jewish supremacy has reigned though all of Israel’s political shifts since 1948. Thus, it is not clear what is the foundation for an alternative pro-Israel program. Fittingly, Tikkun has been supplanted by Jewish Currents as the preeminent critical American Jewish journal, which makes no pretense to providing an alternative Zionist or pro-Israel perspective.

Nevertheless, I have not joined the growing ranks of anti-Zionist Jewish dissenters for two reasons. First, neither the vast majority of Israeli Jews nor Jews elsewhere are about to renounce some form of Jewish self-determination in the territory of Israel-Palestine. Second, although the prevailing Zionist wing demanded Jewish supremacy, the umbrella vision contained appealing dimensions of liberation, egalitarianism, and a just coexistence with Palestinians. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky once remarked, Zionism attracted many Jews who aspired to a transformed Jewish society that would be part of a broader global revolution. Crucially the spirit of an alternative, solidarity-based self-determination still inspires Jewish dissenters. Hence, I regard it as urgent to develop a vision that enables self-determination to flourish for both Jews and Palestinians while categorically breaking from the imperialist and hegemonic nationalist order that has shaped the land since the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

My book reflects my effort to advance such a transformation. I recover the dissenting pre-state Zionist Jewish voices, which included Judah Magnes (a prominent American rabbi and the first chancellor of Hebrew University), Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt. They looked to Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing community institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In contrast to the mainstream Zionist movement, the dissenters were anti-imperialist and urged an accommodation with the indigenous Arabs. They opposed a hegemonic Jewish state because it would displace Palestinians and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. Their alternative was a binational political arrangement, which featured autonomous development for each community, collective equality and shared spaces of governance and community interactions. I adapt this pre-state vision in conversation with a series of post-1967 critical voices, including Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Peter Beinart, and Edward Said to develop a new vision of Jewish self-determination devoted to a hybrid Jewish-universal liberation, a full reckoning of Israel’s depredations, and a just and egalitarian coexistence with Palestinians.

Because the terms “pro-Israel” and “Zionism” have become so attached to a hegemonic and unrepentant set of values, I am not seeking to rescue them. For that reason, I have titled my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism. It is neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel but a plea for a new and inclusive program of Jewish self-determination whereby the fate of the Jewish people is attached to that of Palestinians in particular and of the global community more broadly. It is my hope that a new generation of what Arendt called “conscious pariahs,” some of whom have taken part in Israel’s ongoing and unprecedented wave of mass protests, will embrace such a program.

Examining care injustices

This week in North Philly Notes, Akemi Nishida, author of Just Care, writes about care as an analytical framework to understand the contemporary United States

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to recognize what was at the stake in the political debates on public healthcare programs such as Medicaid, the overstretched nature of the care labor force, and our own vulnerabilities. We also witnessed continuous fights for social justice including Black Lives Matter and Asian Americans against hate crimes, as well as the development of mutual aid networks to survive together.

Just Care suggests care as a lens to understand these phenomena—and incorporates care as not only an object of study but also an analytical framework. The book examines care injustices where people—whether they are situated as care workers, care receivers, or both—deteriorate under the name of care, when care is used as a mechanism to enhance the political economy and neglect the well-being of those situated as care workers and care receivers. It also addresses care justice, or just care, which occurs when people feel cared for affirmatively and when care is used as a foundation for more-just world building.

Just Care is based on research conducted at the request of disability communities to reveal how the public care services they receive are increasingly becoming money-centered, while they demand these services to be human-centered. Also, as a disabled person, my own experiences of receiving and providing care informed my work.

Just Care considers the experiences of care workers and care receivers under the Medicaid long-term care programs, queer disabled people who participate in community-based care collectives to interdependently support each other, and disabled and sick people of color who engage in bed activism to fight for social change from their bedspaces. By being in conversation with and witnessing care routines, the multiplicity of care became particularly noticeable—it is turned into a mechanism of social oppression and control while simultaneously being a tool with which marginalized communities activate, engage in, and sustain social justice fights.

Here are some key points from the book:

• When scholars and activists work to dismantle injustices surrounding care activities, they often approach them by looking into solely the labor exploitation care workers experience or the lack of adequate care recipients endure. Instead, Just Care engages in relational analysis to think through how these circumstances are intertwined and mutually witnessed and experienced, as care workers and receivers spend the majority of their daily lives side by side.
• An example of relational analysis is my tracing of the parallels between the histories of welfare programs for single mothers and families in need, (neo)colonialism and labor migration, and public healthcare programs like Medicaid, from the perspectives of critical race, transnational feminist, and disability studies.
• This analysis shows that in addition to differences in degrees and kinds of care people individually need, intersecting oppressions including racism, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and ableism shape who is currently pressured to take up caring responsibilities and how their own care needs or disabling conditions are quickly neglected. Such oppressions also make us think of disabled people exclusively as recipients of care and rarely acknowledge their caring contributions to society, let alone how the public healthcare services they receive are rarely adequate and can function to surveil them.
• Care services for disabled people are primarily planned by centering financial benefits for the care industrial complex and budget suppressions for governments and are not based on disabled people’s needs and preferences.
• This focus on financial benefits means that well-being of care workers and care recipients become secondary concerns. This leads them to experience mutual debilitation, rather than the presumed idea that one group thrives on the back of the other.
• Some care workers and care recipients under such debilitating public healthcare services develop interdependent relationships to help one another, in the middle of care-based oppression they experience, by transgressing the strict roles given to them.
• Disabled people have started care collectives to practice interdependence and based on their insistence that everyone needs care and can provide care. Engaging in interdependence in the middle of a society that values individualist independence is destined to be full of challenges. One challenge they faced is material (to physically meet all the care needs emerging within the group), and another is affective (to make sure conflicts within the group will not affect quality of care).
• Disabled and sick people engage in social change from their bedspaces, or “bed activism.” Bed activism entails critiquing of intersecting oppressions that manifest in bedspaces and offering visions for a more just world by centering the wisdom of sick and disabled people that emerges from their bedspaces.
• Bed activism can happen actively, for example, when bed dwellers engage in social change by writing a blog post. It also happens in inactive moments, for example, when they rest in their beds while going through depression, pain, or fatigue. Even those moments inform bed activists about their relationships with their bodies and minds or the social conditions that restrict them to their beds.

We all need care and are capable of caring for others in various ways. When we start from this foundational understanding, how can we each engage in just care or more-just world making through care? Just Care points the way to answering this question.

Listen Up! Temple University Press Podcast, Episode 7: David Steele on It Was Always a Choice

This week in North Philly Notes, we debut the latest episode of the Temple University Press Podcast. Host Gary Kramer/Sam Cohn interviews author David Steele about his book It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, which examines American athletes’ activism for racial and social justice, on and off the field.

The Temple University Press Podcast is where you an hear about all the books you’ll want to read next.

Click here to listen

The Temple University Press Podcast is available wherever you find your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, and Overcast, among other outlets.

About this episode

When Colin Kaepernick took a knee, he renewed a long tradition of athlete activists speaking out against racism, injustice, and oppression. Like Kaepernick, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos—among many others, of all races, male and female, pro and amateur—all made the choice to take a side to command public awareness and attention rather than “shut up and play,” as O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods did in the years between Kaepernick and his predecessors. Using their celebrity to demand change, these activists inspired fans but faced great personal and professional risks in doing so. It Was Always a Choice shows how the new era of activism Kaepernick inaugurated builds on these decisive moments toward a bold and effective new frontier of possibilities.

David Steele identifies the resonances and antecedents throughout the twentieth century of the choices that would later be faced by athletes in the post-Kaepernick era, including the era of political organizing following the death of George Floyd. He shows which athletes chose silence instead of action—“dropping the baton,” as it were—in the movement to end racial inequities and violence against Black Americans. The examples of courageous athletes multiply as LeBron James, Megan Rapinoe, and the athlete activists of the NBA, WNBA, and NFL remain committed to fighting daily and vibrantly for social change.

Announcing Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, Spring 2022

This week in North Philly Notes, we present the new issue of our journal, Kalfou.

Special Issue: “In These Uncertain Times, Pittsburgh”

Guest Editors: Leon Ford and Deanna Fracul

FEATURE ARTICLES

Introduction: In These Uncertain Times, Pittsburgh • Deanna Fracul and Leon Ford

Uncertainty, Discourse, and Democracy in John Edgar Wideman’s Writing, 1980s to Today • Leila Kamali

Call-and-Response in the City: Embodied Mercy in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone • Kathy Glass

Resisting Arrest: Race and Pittsburghers’ Struggles against Police Power from the 1840s through the 1950s • Elaine Frantz

Tomorrow Never Came • Jamaal Scott

Working Together for Health Equity: How a Multidisciplinary, Community-Engaged Partnership Reframed Our Understandings of Pittsburgh’s Maternal-Child Health Crisis • Cathleen J. Appelt, Andrew T. Simpson, Jessica A. Devido, Sarah Greenwald, and Brittany Urban

Pittsburgh, the Realest City: Shit Talk’n’, Storytell’n’, Social Livin’ • Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho

IDEAS, ART, AND ACTIVISM

TALKATIVE ANCESTORS

Derrick Bell on Living in Relation to Others

KEYWORDS

Frankstown Was the World with a Big W: Pittsburgh and Beyond, an Interview with John Edgar Wideman • Leila Kamali

LA MESA POPULAR

Black Lives and the Tree of Life • Emmai Alaquiva and Lauren Apter Bairnsfather

ART AND SOCIAL ACTION

East Pittsburgh: White Supremacy, Radical Relationships, and Chosen Family • Norman Conti

MOBILIZED 4 MOVEMENT

Where Have All the Black Revolutionaries Gone in Steel City? An Interview with Sala Udin • Tony Gaskew

TEACHING AND TRUTH

Redreaming Boundaries and Community Engagement: John Edgar Wideman and the Homewood Reading Series • Esohe Osai and Dan Kubis

Khalifa • Richard Khalifa Diggs, with postscript by Norman Conti

IN MEMORIAM

Memorial Quilt: Patchworked Remembrances of Those Stolen from Us • Mian Laubscher, Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, and Keith David Miles

REVIEW

A City Divided: Race, Fear, and the Law in Police Confrontations, by David A. Harris • Jesse S. G. Wozniak

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MOBILIZED 4 MOVEMENT

Scholar Collectives Advocating for Social Justice in Education • Lois A. Yamauchi, Joni B. Acuff, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, Bill Ayers, Margarita Berta-Ávila, Kari Kokka, Kevin Kumashiro, Therese Quinn, Colleen Rost-Banik, and Katherine Schultz

IN MEMORIAM

The People’s Artist: In Loving Memory of Eugene Eda Wade, 1939–2021 • Hannah Jeffery

REVIEW

Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration, by Ashley E. Lucas • Chinua Thelwell

Reviewing women-centric cinema in Bangladesh

This week in North Philly Notes, Elora Halim Chowdhury, author of Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, writes about female representation in Muktijuddho films.

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A modern remake of Ajoy Kar’s 1961 film Saptapadi, Shameen Akhtar’s film Rina Brown (2017) unfolds intimate geographies of love and loss among individuals from India, and West and East Pakistan. One of few independent women filmmakers in Bangladesh, Akhtar offers a tale about unfulfilled dreams of love and freedom, set in contemporary Bangladesh (or, Dhaka City), that traces the return of Rina, an Anglo-Christian, to the now-independent nation that she left during the Bangladesh Liberation War (or, Muktijuddho). Forty years after the war’s end, Rina comes back to participate in a seminar about women in conflict. She seeks out her adolescent love, Darashiko, a Bengali Muslim freedom-fighter-turned-business-executive. Over the course of a long afternoon, the two reminisce about the fading aspirations of the nationalist struggle and its unreconciled trauma.

Though Rina’s past is indelibly linked to the history of Bangladesh, she is now a stranger whose suffering is incomprehensible to the post-war generation. As the couple look out on the sweeping urban landscape of Dhaka City, and think about what could have been, a vacant footbridge bereft of pedestrians serves as a metaphor to all that the war has torn asunder and imaginary borders, intractably entrenched. War changed everything, yet as Darashiko expresses forlornly, “We could not change the country.”

The poster for Rina Brown

I begin with this vignette from Akhtar’s film—a woman-centered Muktijuddho film—because it highlights what the essays in Ethical Encounters strive to do: reimagine a Muktijuddho gender ideology that through visual culture engages with, disrupts, and incites a new imaginary for gender justice. The collection defies conventional readings of the aesthetics and politics of Muktijuddho narratives. They tell stories of the birth of a nation from its margins, constructing a ‘Bangladeshi’ identity that embraces Bengali Muslims, as well as non-Muslims and non-Bengalis, coalescing into a national cinema that crystallizes an emergent Bangladeshi modernity. Yet at the same time, this modernity also relies on a middle-class and masculinist reading of the nation and its history. Ethical Encounters, inspired by women-centric cinema in Bangladesh, illuminates a feminine aesthetic as well as the politics of disruption and agency, healing, and reconciliation.

The poster for Meherjaan

The attempt to memorialize the varied experiences of women in the Liberation War is a way to advocate for and ingrain their complex, agential roles into the national history. Notably, instead of primarily focusing on state-level negotiations or masculine combat, films in this genre highlight the intimate, domestic, or “feminine” sphere as the site of struggle and meaning. By a “feminine” sphere, I mean those spaces that are usually considered feminized—and thus subordinated—within dominant patriarchal ideology. However, reframed, they can also be read as portrayals of nonconformity, mutuality, and solidarity. By allowing the viewer to remember, imagine, and work through traumatic events such as war and conflict through a feminine aesthetic, cinema can encourages appreciatiation of the moral choices and interpretive acts of women, previously consigned to only the “feminine” sphere, cast as passive victims or witnesses. Women in these films instead make unexpected, sometimes jarring, choices: nursing a wounded enemy soldier; seeking the assistance of a sympathetic Pakistani soldier after having been raped by others like him; and embracing a child of rape even when the nation rejects them. Recognizing these moral choices is a legacy of the war that viewers learn to appreciate through the cinematic medium, and these films are an evolving archive where diverse women’s stories are memorialized, as significant and precious as the memorials and museums the state erects to commemorate martyrs.

These films redefine what humanity, loss, and justice mean for victims, and reconfigure relationships between viewer, witness, and ally. They point to the open wound that 1971 still is, especially for women. This foundational trauma remains constitutive of the nation, and Muktijuddho cinema plays a pivotal role in constructing—and disrupting—the gendered subjectivities beget by the war’s legacy. Women’s cinema, and human rights cinema, capture more broad, transnational visions of feminist filmmaking. They recast the relationships of women to war—as plunder of the nation, as dislodged women from that nation—and question the terms of what constitutes the human in these fraught circumstances.

Ultimately, women-centric Muktijuddho films emplot global human rights narratives and aesthetics that defy reductive and monolithic renditions of social reality. They offer complexity and nuance beyond just a tussle between victims and aggressors, loss and triumph, and colonization and liberation. Simultaneously, they strive for more ethical recognitions, drawing on a multiplicity of histories, struggles, and experiences. Woman-centered films provide an alternative reading toward decolonizing notions of agency, freedom, and justice; they imagine a new kind of feminist knowledge-making.

Announcing Temple University Press’ Spring 2022 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we are pleased to present our forthcoming Spring 2022 titles (in alphabetical order).

Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Grant Farred
A provocative collection committed to keeping the dynamism of the Africana Studies discipline alive

Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China, by Jennifer Lin, with a foreword by Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin

An eye-opening account of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unprecedented 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China

Before Crips: Fussin’, Cussin’, and Discussin’ among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs, by John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani

A historical analysis of South Los Angeles juvenile gang life as revealed by those who were there

Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, by Christopher Krentz

Why disabled characters are integral to novels of the global South

Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh, by Elora Halim Chowdhury

Illuminates how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can generate possibilities for gender justice

Exploring Philly Nature: A Guide for All Four Seasons, by Bernard S. Brown, Illustrations by Samantha Wittchen

A handy guide for all ages to Philly’s urban plants, animals, fungi, and—yes—even slime molds

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, edited by James Wolfinger, with a Foreword by Heather Ann Thompson

Highlighting the creativity, tenacity, and discipline displayed by Black activists in Philadelphia

It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism, by David Steele

Examining American athletes’ activism for racial and social justice, on and off the field

Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, by Akemi Nishida

How care is both socially oppressive and a way that marginalized communities can fight for social justice

Letting Play Bloom: Designing Nature-Based Risky Play for Children, by Lolly Tai, with a foreword by Teri Hendy

Exploring innovative, inspiring, and creative ideas for designing children’s play spaces

Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth, by Mrill Ingram

Providing a new vision for the ignored and abused spaces around us

Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton, by Long T. Bui

A study of the stereotype and representation of Asians as robotic machines through history

Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, by J. Celeste Lay

A comprehensive examination of education reforms and their political effects on Black and poor public-school parents in New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina

Regarding Animals, Second Edition, by Arnold Arluke, Clinton R. Sanders, and Leslie Irvine

A new edition of an award-winning book that examines how people live with contradictory attitudes toward animals

School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization, by Pamela Wilcox, Graham C. Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer

Why some school environments are more conducive to crime than safety

Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, by Joo Ok Kim

Examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano/a cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy

Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood, by George Uba

An evocative yet unsparing examination of the damaging effects of post-internment ideologies of acceptance and belonging experienced by a Japanese American family

What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now, by Roberta Rehner Iversen

Voices from the labor market on the chronic lack of advancement

What will work eventually look like?

This week in North Philly Notes, we focus on our new and forthcoming Labor Studies titles in honor of Labor Day.

 Workforce Development 

The Many Futures of Work reframes the conversation about contemporary workplace experience by providing both “top down” and “bottom up” analyses.  

America in the 20^thcentury

Becoming Entitled examines Americans’ shift in thinking about government social insurance programs during the Great Depression.

Communists and Community shows what role Communists played in the advancement of social democracy. 

Elaine Black Yoneda (forthcoming) presents a critical biography of the Jewish labor activist and feminist pioneer. 

Industrial histories

“A Road to Peace and Freedom” recounts the history of the International Workers Order.

From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging analyzes the expansion and restriction of collective bargaining rights for public employees.

Social justice and social welfare 

Motherlands challenges preconceived notions of the states that support working mothers. 

Labor economics 

Daily Labors and its examination of Black and Latino day laborers’ experience on an NYC street corner.

Sociology of work 

A Collective Pursuit argues that teachers’ unions are working in community to reinvigorate the collective pursuit of reforms beneficial to both educators and public education.

Policing in Natural Disasters shows how disaster work impacts law enforcement officers and first responders.

Making Their Days Happen (forthcoming) explores the complexities of the interpersonal dynamics and policy implications affecting personal assistance service consumers and providers.

For all of our Labor Studies

Announcing the new issue of Kalfou

This week in North Philly Notes, we feature the new issue of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies

One highlight from Vol. 7 No. 2 (2020) is that the issue contains a special collection of articles dedicated to the impact of Lorgia García-Peña‘s work on scholarship and civic life. Harvard’s denial of tenure to her in 2019 sparked an intense nationwide discussion of how ethnic studies is devalued in the academy, and this issue mounts a defense of both her pioneering intersectional work in theorizing Blackness, Afrolatinidad, and dominicanidad as well as of the contemporary necessity of the field of ethnic studies more broadly.

Table of Contents:

Kalfou: A JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE AND RELATIONAL ETHNIC STUDIES

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 • FALL 2020

SYMPOSIUM ON THE SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING OF LORGIA GARCÍA-PEÑA

THE PRESENT CRISIS

Ethnic Studies Matters • Lourdes Torres

Shattering Silences: Dictions, Contradictions, and Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads • George Lipsitz

When Your Mentee Is Denied Tenure: Reflections on Lorgia García-Peña’s Work • Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández

Three Essays toward Care in and beyond Academia • Camara Brown, Eun-Jin Keish Kim, and Massiel Torres Ulloa

Your Mirada. Gracias. Siempre: Afro-Asia, Intimacies, and Women-of-Color Feminisms • Catherine R. Peters

DOMINICANIDAD AS A CRUCIBLE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

Latinidad, Dominicanidad, and Anti-Blackness: Two Nations under U.S. Empire • Laura Briggs

Bringing Dominican History from the Footnote to the Center of the Page • Elizabeth S. Manley

FEATURE ARTICLES

Susto, Sugar, and Song: ire’ne lara silva’s Chicana Diabetic Poetics • Amanda Ellis

“The Blackness That Incriminated Me”: Stigma and Normalization in Brothers and Keepers • Adam Burston, Jesse S. G. Wozniak, Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho, and Norman Conti

Contesting Legal Borderlands: Policing Insubordinate Spaces in Imperial County’s Farm Worker Communities, 1933–1940 • Stevie Ruiz

IDEAS, ART, AND ACTIVISM

TALKATIVE ANCESTORS

Gloria E. Anzaldúa on the Illusion of “Safe Spaces”

KEYWORDS

The Knowledge of Justice in America • Julie J. Miller

LA MESA POPULAR

Discovering Dominga: Indigenous Migration and the Logics of Indigenous Displacement • Floridalma Boj Lopez

ART AND SOCIAL ACTION

Three Films of Yehuda Sharim • John T. Caldwell

Songs That Never End: A Film by Yehuda Sharim • George Lipsitz

TEACHING AND TRUTH

Situating Blackness and Antiracism in a Global Frame: Key Works for a Study of the Dominican Republic • Elizabeth S. Manley and April J. Mayes

About the journal:

Kalfou is published bi-annually by Temple University Press on behalf of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is focused on social movements, social institutions, and social relations. Kalfou seeks to build links among intellectuals, artists, and activists in shared struggles for social justice. The journal seeks to promote the development of community-based scholarship in ethnic studies among humanists and social scientists and to connect the specialized knowledge produced in academe to the situated knowledge generated in aggrieved communities.

Why We Turn to Intersectionality to Confront Anti-Asian Violence

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost, with permission from Northern California Grantmakers, an essay by Alice Y. Hom, coeditor of the forthcoming Q & A, about the recent anti-Asian violence.

This has been a hard week of swirling emotions since I learned six Asian women and two other people were shot in Atlanta amidst the rise of anti-Asian violence here and nationwide. The names identified so far are: Soon Chung Park (74), Suncha Kim (69), Yong Ae Yue (63),Hyun Jung Grant (51), Xiaojie Tan (49), Daoyou Feng (44), Paul Andre Michels (54), and Dalaina Ashley Yaun (33). I am sending my deep condolences to their loved ones, families, and communities. Rage, grief, and sadness course through me as I wake up and tend to my work, check in with kin and kindred, read the news, and skim social media. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed.  

I am not surprised the shooter, a white man, denied that race motivated his attacks against three massage parlors and spas. But I’m angry at the denial and the shortsightedness of law enforcement, the media, and others who relay the shooter’s explanation and enable the claim that racism doesn’t play a role in his actions.  

Instead, let this be a moment to challenge the idea that anyone might ever be entitled to inflict violence on the pretext that they are driven by “sexual addiction.” This violence should be understood as the deadly expression of racialized and sexualized stereotypes of Asian women, specifically migrants who work at massage parlors and spas whose low income and status as immigrants expose them to risk. Our country’s wars and military operations throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim have, over many years, reinforced sex trades and racialized sexual violence toward Asian women.  

Here we must challenge ourselves to consider race, gender, heterosexuality, and class not as separate forms of identity, but interacting together, to deepen our understanding of the deaths of these women and our Asian elders here in the Bay Area. This concept of interlocking identities is not new and comes from Black lesbian feminists organizing in the 1970s under the Combahee River Collective.  

The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, who explains, “It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these.”  

This approach helps us make sense of the violence against Asian women and the way it’s connected to violence faced by women of color, Black and Indigenous women, in particular.  I hope the following articles, statements, and interviews provide some insight and support you taking action to strengthen our collective fight against the intersecting oppressions of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism.  

In these moments, we draw strength by calling upon the rich connections of our movements, the power of our voice, and the resources for social justice over which we have influence.