The College Hill Independent —Vol 46 Issue 3

From the Editors

Crow Fact #1: Crows play, with each other and with dogs and even cats.

Crow Fact #2: Crows have an inside voice.

Crow Fact #3: Crows never forget a face (do you?).

Crow Fact #4: Crows gather in honor of their fallen and the dusk.

Crow Fact #5: Crows will tell their children if you are cruel to them.

Crow Fact #6: Crows always know what time it is.

Crow Fact #7: Crows are not an omen of anything but the falling night. -ES

Above the city, hordes of crows were about to tell us something about winter here. I saw smoke drift down the hall for three seconds and then a fire alarm went off. My roommate remembered to lock the door, I subconsciously waited for someone to say this is not a drill, and the looming net cast over and over by the birds brushed by outside. There’s been a dead squirrel out that window for weeks, and it keeps freezing, thawing, and re-freezing. Apparently squirrels never find over half of the nuts they bury in preparation for the cold. We’ll see the crows again, but winter has spoken for itself. -ZB

Masthead*

MANAGING EDITORS

Zachary Braner

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Ella Spungen

WEEK IN REVIEW

Karlos Bautista

Morgan Varnado

ARTS

Kian Braulik

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

EPHEMERA

Ayça Ülgen

Livia Weiner

FEATURES

Madeline Canfield

Jane Wang

LITERARY

Ryan Chuang

Evan Donnachie

Anabelle Johnston

METRO

Mark Buckley

Jack Doughty

Rose Houglet

Sacha Sloan

SCIENCE + TECH

Eric Guo

Angela Qian

Katherine Xiong

WORLD

Everest Maya-Tudor

Lily Seltz

X

Claire Chasse

DEAR INDY

Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD

Sofia Barnett

Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Sage Jennings

Anabelle Johnston

Corinne Leong

Isaac McKenna

Sacha Sloan

Jane Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Tanvi Anand

Cecilia Barron

Graciela Bautista

Mariana Fajnzylber

Saraphina Forman

Keelin Gaughan

Sarah Goldman

Jonathan Green

Sarah Holloway

Anushka Kataruka

Roza Kavak

Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo

Abani Neferkara

Justin Scheer

Julia Vaz

Kathy/Siqi Wang

Madeleine Young

COPY CHIEF

Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Qiaoying Chen

Veronica Dickstein

Eleanor Dushin

Aidan Harbison

Doren Hsiao-Wecksler

Jasmine Li

Rebecca Martin-Welp

Kabir Narayanan

Eleanor Peters

Angelina Rios-Galindo

Taleen Sample

Angela Sha

Jean Wanlass

Michelle Yuan

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR

Angela Lian

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Kian Braulik

Angela Lian

Natalie Mitchell

Chinmayi Rajaram

WEB MANAGER

Isaac McKenna

WEB EDITORS

Hadley Dalton

Arman Deendar

Ash Ma

GAMEMAKERS

Alyscia Batista

Anna Wang

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

COVER COORDINATOR

Zora Gamberg

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Nicole Ban

Brianna Cheng

Ri Choi

Ashley Guo

Kira Held

Xinyu/Sara Hu

Gina Kang

Amy/Youjin Lim

Andrew Liu

Ash Ma

Jaesun Myung

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Floria Tsui

Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Sophie Foulkes

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Lucy Carpenter

Bethenie Carriaga

Julia/Shuo Yun Cheng

Avanee Dalmia

Michelle Ding

Nicholas Edwards

Jameson Enriquez

Lillyanne Fisher

Haimeng Ge

Jacob Gong

Ned Kennedy

Elisa Kim

Sarosh Nadeem

Hannah Park

Luca Suarez

Yanning Sun

Anna Wang

Camilla Watson

Iris Wright

Nor Wu

Celine Yeh

Jane Zhou

MVP

World

The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI in Seekonk, MA

The CollegeHillIndependent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN BEING TALL

GIRL BAND

It’s an unusually warm Saturday night in February. I have made it to an unassuming student house on Governor Street, and I step through a backdoor into a dark hallway. At the end of the hallway is a creaky wooden staircase.

As I walk down the stairs, I enter an entirely different world—the basement. I’m immediately hit with the smell of damp concrete and feel the heat of the sticky, sweaty bodies of the eager undergraduate students descending down the staircase with me. This particular basement is emblematic of most belonging to student housing. It’s gener ously post-industrial: the exposed pipes and scattered machinery provide a sentimental reminder of a time when people operated such complex mechanisms. I look up and see an ecosystem: the cobwebs provide evidence of a welcoming home for the spiders scurrying around, and the mold spots form a Jackson Pollock on the ceiling.

I am here to see TAAL, a student band out of Brown University. Since last semester, this self-described “girl band” (they assert that guitarist Mark Buckley puts the “men” in feminism) have built a substantial following within the Brown student band scene. Impressive for a band with no officially released music (they do not have a Bandcamp, Soundcloud, or Spotify page).

Student bands can be a petri dish for music-bro types who think that drawn-out and intricate guitar solos make for good music. What struck me about TAAL’s set was their simplicity. They’re a “femme-punk” band à la Childbirth that don’t take themselves too seriously; their merchandise—boxer shorts, bras, and tank tops—epitomizes this. The last after a series of student bands, TAAL’s members—Aisha Tipnis B’23, guitarist Mark Buckley B’23, bassist and vocalist Becca Siegel B’23.5, and drummer Tanya Qu B’25—have an electric stage presence: Aisha and Becca, donning heart-shaped dollar-store sunglasses, establish a playful call-and-response between themselves and with the audience. Their original music keeps the throng of tipsy college students dancing in this dingy, fairy-light-adorned basement—their track “Busy Lady” is a crowd favorite thanks to its deft one-liners (“know what they call me? / Massage Gun Kelly”). As their set ends, they manage to piece together a rendition of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” “based purely on vibes.” I’d like to think it was also based on the keg of jungle juice, empty by the time their set rolled around.

After their basement show, I sat down with members of the band to try and understand their story and chart their progress from backyards, to basements, to legendary downtown Providence DIY venue AS220.

Before the basement, TAAL were a backyard act, jamming in the garden of Brown University’s West House in the spring of 2022, they tell me. As far as the music scene on College Hill is concerned, these small garden jam sessions represented a new beginning after COVID-19 lockdowns. Guitarist and vocalist Aisha explained that such events “had stopped and people had not been doing anything [like this] ever since.” They explained that TAAL’s Halloween set in the same basement on Governor Street was especially exciting: it was their first show of the semester.

While TAAL might be a basement-show staple on College Hill, they made their first foray into the wider scene, playing alongside local Providence and New England bands People Eating Plastic, One Way Out, and Haunting Titans at AS220 on February 18. “AS220 represents a step—it’s not one of our friends’ basements, and it’s not the [Watermyn] Coop which we know… it’s exciting,” guitarist Mark said.

As I was writing this piece, I tried to dig for some sort of deeper significance. What does it mean, collectively, culturally, that we could all be in a basement listening to earnest, slightly shitty music together? When interviewing the band, Becca made an ironic comment about how they are “just friends making music.” But maybe—just maybe—their friendship is about the music made along the way.

AI DEATH DROP

In a world with systems created to support white supremacy and patriarchal ideals, those that exist outside of these concepts fight to stay afloat. In the case of Black and queer folk, living itself is controversial. Luckily, art has long been an avenue that embraces controversy. Sparking such controversy is the very thing that allows artists to shift the culture. The most influential art invites us to be fearless. To look at the world in all of its horror and beauty, from the artist’s eyes. Then, from an altered lens, to look inwardly at ourselves. This is what Rashaad Newsome evokes in his artificial intelligence project, Being.

I didn’t know that much about digital art—or art in general. It’s not that I find it uninteresting—my short attention span leads me to gravitate toward pieces with visually stimulating movement. I blame this on my 15 years of dance lessons; I can never sit still. After learning about this event, I did some research on Newsome. The first image I came across was a Black figure in a tribal patterned dress and red bottom heels, performing a “death drop.” I instantly knew I had to attend.

On February 7, I entered an intimate auditorium at the List Art Center. I spotted attendees from all walks of life. Young creatives wearing thrifted clothes, silver-haired, older women excited to learn about the AI art scene, and me, a student in the middle of a cold, winter slump, ready to immerse myself into the warmth Newsome’s work provokes. After I took a seat, Newsome hit the stage with a calmtoned voice and a compelling presence.

Hailing from New Orleans, Newsome delved into the digital world with a slideshow of his experimental art centered on the Black and queer experience. Newsome describes his work as “creative gumbo,” his inspiration ranging from bell hooks to friends’ selfies. This combination of Black expression of the past and present is visible in Being. The idea for Being blossomed out of Newsome’s reflections on the dehumanization of slavery. To display the practice of enslaved people being worked like machines, he created a human-modeled robot.

The AI’s exterior is made up of metallic, gold eyes referencing car culture and a body with intertwined segments of open wires and wooden-modeled fragments. Its interior is revealed through language and dance. Being teaches voguing, a dance style originated by the Black LGBTQ+ community in 1980s Harlem. Through a screen, Being demonstrates choreography and speaks in a robotic yet confident tone using AAVE references. A microphone is set up, facing the screen, allowing the audience to ask Being questions or make requests. When Being doesn’t adhere to their demands or is unable to answer to engagers’ standards, they often become frustrated. Newsome argued that humans expect robots to comply, paralleling the dehumanization of an enslaved person’s adherence to their master.

This resembles the isolating experience of simply existing in predominantly white areas. There have been times when I, as a Black woman, have been asked to speak on the Black experience as a whole to white individuals as an educational source in their anti-racist journey. These situations left me with complex and contrasting emotions. It feels like a missed opportunity not to inform them how they contribute to unjust systems of oppression. On the other hand, I am only one person. One Black woman navigating how to decline without being viewed as “sassy” or “angry” or responsible for the prejudice I receive. Moreover, I am figuring out how to operate in a digitally-centered world, where the opinions and expectations of the patriarchy dominate my feed. How can I or Being be voices against racist rhetoric in digital spaces without being flooded by microaggressions?

This patriarchal domination increases as wealthy people with poor morals stand at the forefront of digital technology. Their views often taint AI spaces. Newsome rebelled against them in his talk, displaying a video of Being voguing through city streets. Behind the AI were visuals of buildings burning down.

After the talk, the hypothetical world of the video made Hannah Bashkow B’23 ask, “Who are the people rejoicing?” She wondered what “new and different programming” would arise if women had more agency in the creation of AI.

Newsome’s work led me to question in what other ways technology is geared toward a white, male, heteronormative perspective. The concerns it expresses support my newfound opinion that technology can carry inherent racist, sexist, and heteronormative biases.

When asked what he hopes up-and-coming artists, especially Black and queer artists, take away from his work, Newsome touched on the lack of people that reflected him when entering the art world. He aspires to change this, stating, “I hope to be a demonstration and fill the void.” It is safe to say that Being, in all its Blackness and queerness, fills it.

THE SEEDS THAT WON’T SAVE US

WITH DR. XAN CHACKO

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

One might presume that botany—a broad term for the scientific study of plants that encompasses an investigation into species structure, ecology, classification, and beyond—deals with that which is alive. Bright green, sprouting, surrounded by their brethren. A rolling field, each blade of grass indistinguishable from the next.

But what if I told you that much of what botanists study looks entirely different? When they’re not in the field identifying and collecting plant specimens, these scientists are conducting research inside repositories of physical knowledge, storing botanical artifacts that have been pressed, dried, and/or frozen, stowed away for further study, future use, or safekeeping. One such repository is a seed bank. These facilities vary in purpose and function, but their general objective is to protect plant species’ genetic diversity through the preservation of their seeds. Some seed bank institutions might utilize their stores for agricultural research—specifically in service of engineering genetically modified species that are adaptive to climatic changes— while others are simply invested in genetic conservation. The practice of storing seeds goes back thousands of years, and seed banking as we know it today has taken place since the early 20th-century.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located in Norway’s remote Spitsbergen archipelago. With its futuristic facade, Svalbard is just one highly visible example of an international institution, independent of any government entity. Dr. Xan Chacko, Director of Undergraduate Studies for Brown University’s department of Science, Technology, and Society, has spent the last two decades of her career investigating international seed banks like Svalbard: uncovering their histories, situating the scientific expertise they produce within their broader context. Chacko’s research, in her words, “complicates the taken-for-grantedness of scientific knowledge production.” She interrogates the ways in which these epistemological processes have historically taken place, and reimagines how we can continue to engage in knowledge-making in ways that avoid harm and provide for a livable future.

As a chill overtook the air and threaded between the dead hydrangeas that line College Hill, Dr. Chacko sat down with the College Hill Independent to discuss her recent research: how science is made in colonial and postcolonial systems, how feminist vocabularies can transform scientific research, and how seed banks can function within changing research and environmental ecosystems.

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Mariana Fajnzylber: Your current book project historicizes seed banking and interrogates its colonial legacies. For readers who may be unfamiliar: What is seed banking?

Dr. Xan Chacko: Seed banking is part of a whole myriad of different practices that are currently working in tandem in order to conserve the living systems that are on Earth. The idea is very simple. You take these seeds of the plants that are alive in the world and you bring them to a facility called a seed bank laboratory. Then you prepare them for long-term storage in a freezer. Most of these freezers are around minus 20 degrees Celsius. The idea is that by slowing down their metabolism in a sub-zero environment, we take advantage of the seeds’ natural capacity for dormancy. That’s what seed banking is. As I said, it’s part of a whole ecology of practices that emerge around the need to save biosystems.

MF: What major institutions are usually involved in this work?

XC: This form of seed banking is a pretty recent phenomenon because it requires the technology

of the freezer. So while the practice of saving seeds across multiple seasons in cold, dry places has been part of systems of agriculture for more than 5,000 years, the extension of that in the freezer is relatively recent. You have to ask: Who has the capacity to maintain that kind of energy requirement? Who has the capacity and space to go about collecting and preparing seeds for long term storage?

Historically, these institutions have fallen into three main groups. One is the hyper-local, small-scale facility that is innovating and doing research in particular crops. These tend to be local government institutions. Then, we have [seed banks at] the national scale, to whom a local institution might say, we have all these seeds that we’re putting in our freezer, but there’s always a possibility for something to go wrong, like if our power fails or we have a flood. So it would be good for us to have a backup copy of our collection housed at a facility that is controlled by the national interest. The third kind of seed bank is the one that I’ve been focusing on most, because it is the one that symbolizes what I see as a recapitulation to colonial practices more clearly than anything else. And that is the international organization. They gather seeds from all over the world and claim responsibility for safeguarding them on behalf of the populations and places that are represented in that seed bank. And alongside those international organizations are private organizations that take on some of this kind of responsibility. The one that I spent the most of my time doing research on is the Millennium Seed Bank partnership, which is the seed bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which is based in the UK. It’s partially government funded, but mostly privately funded.

MF: Your work looks at how these privately-funded facilities engage in conservation work, perhaps in their own self-interest. Could you expand a little bit more on the role that these entities play in seed banking today?

XC: The third category is the most publicly visible kind of seed bank. If you search for seed banks in the media, it’s predominantly those ones that come up. Funnily enough, those spaces tend to have very iconic architecture and edifices; they’re very photogenic, very clickbait-y. The other seed bank where I spend time in that third category is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. When I first started working on this project, I would have had to explain my research for the first five minutes of any conversation. But now, when I say the word ‘seed bank,’ more often than not people have seen something: Oh, you mean the one in the Arctic? It’s so good that people are doing that. And I guess that’s the other part that was really intriguing to me, that these institutions like Kew and Svalbard have managed to gather public approval and quite a lot of private funding to support their activities.

For me, it was very curious because I know that there’s this huge system of safeguarding seeds that has been taking place since the early 20th century. Yet the ones that folks pay the most attention to are these big flashy ones. There are books being published about them. There are no books being published about the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi, even though they have more genetic diversity than Svalbard. By a lot. It baffled me that there was all this interest suddenly happening in this space. So, part of my project was shaped to attend to this. How is this rhetoric of [saviorism] being mobilized to gather interest and support for this research? How likely is this research to actually be viable? This whole seed banking project has built into it a kind of unknown future. We must do this now, otherwise we won’t have anything in the future. But we will only know if this was efficacious in the actual future. One that doesn’t yet exist.

There’s a part of us that needs those kinds of stories. We need the hope that the seed banks offer, amidst the doom that they already portray. Take the Svalbard institution. How does that not

already communicate that we’ve done something wrong? You’re supposed to be keeping something alive in this seemingly inhospitable environment? They even call it the ‘doomsday’ vault.

What these seed banks have been really good at doing is showcasing examples where they have reintroduced plants that have gone extinct from ecosystems. I call them their poster plants. One of these poster plants at Kew was a species that had gone extinct in South Africa that had been part of their historical collections, but actually [landed in] the UK by theft. All of those stories can be greenwashed: They have managed to save those seeds where they have now become extinct, and by saving them in the freezer, they’ve actually prolonged their lives— so it doesn’t matter how they got there.

MF: Going back to the comment you made a few minutes ago, about these private, international initiatives as a recapitulation of colonial projects: Some of your historical research draws attention to the practices and legacies of plant exploration, or, as you refer to it, ‘plant hunting.’ These USDA-led expeditions were led not by professional botanists or farmers, but self-described ‘explorers.’ Could you expand more on the ways in which imperial projects coincided with scientific research, particularly in the field of botany? Does this history feel linked to the private influence exerted in botany today? How so?

XC: I started my training in the history of science. One of the areas I was really drawn to was about how knowledge about the world was created under colonialism, the process of colonial transfer as being key to the production of knowledge about the world and the kind of classification systems that we have inherited. So, for instance, the gender binary, racial hierarchies, were created by scientists who were examining bodies of plants, animals, and humans. [They were] trying to make sense of the world that they had already felt they understood very well, trying to make sense of ‘scientific objects’ that were new to them.

I thrived thinking about those questions: transport and translation and the lives and impacts of intermediary players who did not manage to have their stories valorized. We always hear about Darwin and Hooker doing their travels, but we don’t necessarily hear about the brokers, the intermediaries, the translators, the guides in the places where they were that took them to see the things they were asking to find. The intermediaries took these scientists to see the things that they had already known existed. Yet the scientists still managed to call it their discovery.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it along the animal side, but I found that my colonial science training came alive when I was thinking about plants. In your need to be able to survive in a new place, whether it’s because of settler or market colonialism, understanding what not to eat and what to eat, what’s going to give you a headache and what’s going to kill you—it’s a question of life and death. The kind of analytical work that goes into the movement of people and plants from one place to the whole world for migration or economic gain requires not only an understanding of the plants, but also of plants as the primordial experimental subjects.

Keeping track of what plants are involved in these exchanges needs to always be alongside our study of human labor systems and social reproduction, a lot of what we now see as racial capitalism. And institutions like Kew [historically] have been central in doing things like ‘discovering’ something in one place, bringing them back to Kew, and then transporting them to their different colonies to see if they could be useful and productive and profitable.

Part of the reason why I was curious to follow the story into the 21st century, as a postcolonial subject myself, was because I thought that this story was in the realm of the historians.

But then, as part of a science communication project, I went to Kew. I was in London, we were doing a thing on plants, so of course you have to go and hang out with people at Kew. And when I went to Kew they were like, Oh, if you’re talking about cutting-edge plant science, you need to go to the Millennium Seed Bank. And I was like, what is this thing you speak of? And this was the early 2000s, so there wasn’t a lot in the papers about it. When I went to the Millennium Seed Bank and heard what the project was, and why it was so crucial to our very survival as a human species, some part of me was like, wait, hold on. You’re telling me that you have expeditions that you get funded and you go to places around the world and then you collect up their seeds and then you bring them back to London? I was like, this is very… similar to this other thing that was happening 150 years ago, that, for all intents and purposes, I thought was over.

There’s the very literal aspect of the accumulation, which is profoundly similar. But more than that is the rhetoric of neoliberalism, which is a different kind of rhetoric than what was being mobilized in the colonial period, but of which there is a colonial legacy. This is overtly paternalistic: We owe it to these places that have been subjugated through colonialism. Institutions like Kew will offer things like skills training for scientists in those countries to do identification and collection—the ‘right way’ to do things because Kew knows the ‘right way,’ of course—and they might sponsor facilities for them to do the same kind of seed banking in that country.

The idea is that we’re not taking all of your seeds, we’re just gonna be the backup, and whenever you want them, you can take them back from us. Whether or not that has actually panned out is to be seen in the future.

MF: But there’s no provision of capital or other resources from institutions like Kew to ensure that happens, right?

XC: Correct.

MF: So much of this research deals with materiality, right? These physical specimens, seeds, these storage facilities, even artistic or journalistic artifacts. But I’m also interested in the way that your work deals with language. You just published a journal article that outlined a feminist genealogy of the word ‘seed.’ It seemed to me that so much of that article was rooted in how we conceptualize scientific production as an economic imperative rather than an act of care. Can you speak a little more about the role of the words we use in producing scientific knowledge?

XC: I’m a devotee of Donna Haraway, and Haraway articulates very clearly how much it matters what language we use to understand the world. It matters what concepts we think with. Haraway has been really inspired by the work of science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who meditates on the idea of naming as being this profoundly world-making phenomenon. When you do it in poetry, when you do it in literature, when you do it in art through different media, it doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of standardizing, homogenizing, and universalizing effect that it can have when it comes out of the sciences. One of the cunning traps of science is that the representations of the world that are being created out of science do not care about whether they are just. They just have to be ‘accurate.’ There is this

experimental forces of science in order to be revealed to us mere mortals about how the world actually is. It has the sticking power, such that even if we know that certain terms or certain categories are actually harmful or not true, it’s really difficult to work against the incredible inertia built into their usage, getting people to not only change their minds, but change beliefs.

In the plant world, it’s particularly frustrating because plants have been horrifically misrepresented in the way that we know them through the binomial nomenclature that we have inherited. Not only does Linnaeus [the ‘father of taxonomy’] assume that there are correlates to human male and female anatomy in plants, but also the way that the classification of plants happens in Linnaean systems portrays them as husband and wife, as specifically heteronormative and heteropatriarchal.

And that is very dangerous because it does not accurately reflect the reality out there at all, which is supposed to be the fundamental reason why science has so much power. What if I told you that 80 percent of the flowering plants have both the male and the female sex organs in their flowers? How can an overwhelming majority of beings be an ‘aberrant’ outsider in the way that we consider it for human beings? We either need to change what we consider to be an outsider from the human perspective, or we need to radically revise the way that we understand plants.

MF: Or both.

XC: Yes, yes. The thing that I tell people who are like, Oh, you’re a feminist science studies person. Why are you paying so much attention to plants? is well, we have a lot to learn from plants. What could we learn by actually vegetalizing ourselves, by looking at the kinds of kin relations, the kinds of networks of communication that plants have? It would radically open up the possibilities for human community, collaboration, kinship. Plants are famous for doing interspecies breeding, for being overwhelmingly hermaphroditic, and for having ecologies of relations that are intricately a part of the reproductive processes. They’re so much more radical than we would even dream to be. Gender studies and queer studies have a lot to learn from plants, because they have been modeling nonheteronormative kin for their entire existence.

MF: But the language imposed on plants seems to me to be a very active agent in these colonial histories of botany. Do you see these Western, colonial epistemologies being undone in the field of botany, and specifically in the practice of seed storing?

XC: That’s a very hopeful question. I can’t say that the spaces that I am spending so much time in are really open to rethinking not only their practices, but also their epistemologies. There are some indications that this buzzword of ‘decolonization’ could be something that motivates institutions to rethink some of their practices, but when you have the twin crises of the climate and extinction, it’s really difficult. I have had conversations with folks where I’ve been met with resistance; that to stop the work that they’re doing and slow down could be the difference between success or failure. That’s how strongly they are embedded in the logic of the crisis. And the crisis is real; I’m not a crisis denier. Yet at the same time it is so blatantly obvious to me that part of the reason that we

look at some of the historical collections and talk about returning them to the communities from which they were taken.

It’s a very negative answer to your question, but the reality is, I don’t see it happening in the spaces that I’m following. There are other small, non-governmental organizations that are doing all kinds of fantastic work, working with farmers, working with local communities, taking seeds out of museums and repatriating them into indigenous communities. Those people exist. Their work is fantastic. That’s not the story I’m telling.

If people take anything away from spending five minutes with me it is that there are 1500 seed banks. It’s not going to be Svalbard, it’s never going to be Svalbard. Svalbard exists as an icon. It’s not meant to directly serve people; it directly serves the institutions that have banked seeds there. Local institutions like the Rice Research Station in Southern India are not affiliated with any multinational corporation. They’re entirely government funded, and they have produced new [rice] varieties that can withstand antibiotic stresses that are happening because of climate change. They have been successfully introducing new varieties every year that farmers, including my father, have had great success in growing. There’s a side of the seed banking story that is actively connected with food production that you never hear about, that is just constantly going on in the background.

MF: In this work of more accurately situating both historical and modern-day institutions within a colonial legacy, how can we better study botany and produce better technoscientific research?

XC: I see my role in bringing those things together split between my responsibilities in publication and in teaching. Part of what I try to do in all of my classes is make it such that folks who have science backgrounds or don’t have science backgrounds can come together to create a common vocabulary. It comes back to words. Because often if you don’t have scientific training, you may not necessarily be able to parse out the nuances of what is being promised versus the reality. Because if you’re not comfortable reading scientific journal articles, you’re not necessarily thinking about how this piece of science fits into a bigger ecology of scientific knowledge. And then from the science side: You may be very familiar with the actual science itself, but you may not necessarily be thinking of the kinds of impacts it has on the world and the worlds that have produced it in the first place. Studying the histories of the sciences that have produced the knowledge that you are embedded in as a scientist is incredibly empowering. It can be paralyzing at first to learn that the science that you are studying has deeply colonial and very troubling histories. But I think that if anything is, it should provide the impetus to do things differently.

The trouble with this God’s-eye, ‘objective reality’ that science provides is that it doesn’t recognize or take seriously that it matters not only who’s doing the science, but also why the science is being done. If we have folks who are better equipped to ask the questions about who this affects and in what way, then it leads to, hopefully, the production of scientists and people who are working toward a future that’s based in justice.

MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5 is pocketing cherry pits in case of end times.

I’m not

much of an online shopper. In fact, I’m not much of a shopper at all. I could easily lie and say that I reject the capitalistic customs of our modern society, that I prefer to hand-sew my garments out of recycled fabrics rather than contribute to the insatiable appetite of the clothing industry. But to be honest, I’m as cheap as they come. I prefer to collect trinkets I find in antique stores and rain-swept gutters not only because I secretly wanted to be a crow as a child, but also because they cost less than faded Nirvana t-shirts at Spencer’s. So when I discovered Craigslist as a contemporary alternative to dumpster diving, I felt like I had entered an entirely new realm of purchasing power. With just a few clicks on my keyboard, I could find free scrap metal sold a few miles away by a man named Hank, or a signed copy of a book I had never heard of, or even a set of dusty medals from a bygone era. In middle school, I became known as the boy with the auctioneer’s hammer, constantly scrolling through endless pages of discounted garbage in search of a better bargain. Here’s a list of some of my favorite finds:

• A life-sized replica of Slimer from Ghostbusters ($120)

• A Philly cheesesteak ($450,000)

• A slightly melted Geiger counter ($35)

• An entire deli ($350,000)

• A goldfish named Kevin ($15)

• A flashdrive containing 80 books on Civil War prisons ($10.95)

• A “super funky and cool lamp” ($45)

• Free almonds ($5)

• A human hamster wheel (Free)

• A pair of vintage porcelain rats ($30)

• A haunted chair covered in claw marks (Free)

I never actually ended up purchasing anything, no matter how cheap. Being a 12-year-old Latino in Brooklyn, New York meant that buying anything online was strictly prohibited by my mother because God forbid somebody were to track my location and rob the duplex wedged between the projects and a rat-infested bodega. But since Craigslist’s offers are based on your location, living in New York proved to be an advantage. Weirdness and absurdity were abundant, and browsing Craigslist became my form of daily entertainment, similar to watching compilations of people getting hurt on yoga balls. As the years wore on, I slowly forgot about my sanctuary of discarded knick-knacks and dusty antiques. Like so many other parts of the World Wide Web that shaped my childhood, Craigslist became a relic of the past, left to rot in the corner of the internet where purple URLs curl up and die.

Time passed in a swift blur of academic drudgery. I grew a few feet, gained some scraggly facial hair, took some AP exams, and graduated high school. In what felt like the blink of an eye, I found myself sitting on an Amtrak headed to Providence, Rhode Island, a place I had never been before but that I knew would somehow become home over the course of four years. My mother stirred up a dizzying whirlwind of power strips, shower caddies, and dorm posters that reminded me of the Tasmanian Devil’s cartoonish antics. When the dust finally settled, I was sitting in a dorm room that felt like it had just landed on an alien planet thousands of miles away. I nodded my way through the tedium of orientation events, campus introductions, and

icebreaker activities, a faux smile plastered onto my face. And the endless array of Instagram stories, Sidechat posts, and BeReals that bombarded my phone screen every night did nothing to help. I felt isolated and alone in a school that practically advertised its community as the world’s largest group hug. Was I doing something wrong? Or was something wrong with me? In a last-ditch effort to explore more of Providence without having to leave my room, I opened up my computer and logged back onto Craigslist for the first time in years. I was immediately met with the same stark UI that had greeted me so many years ago. It seemed that while I was busy growing up, Craigslist had refused to undergo even the simplest of changes, frozen in time like a digital fly trapped in pre-2000s amber. As I prepared to scroll through some local oddities and unwanted furniture, a feature near the bottom of the screen caught my eye: a section for forum pages. Wondering what people could possibly be discussing on a page dedicated to the unwanted, I clicked on the link and was sucked into a rabbit hole of internet obscurity.

+++

The Craigslist forums are an overwhelming hodgepodge of topics at first glance, ranging from “marriage problems” and “bicycling” to “taxes” and “philosophy.” There are no likes or retweets on these pages, nor are there accounts to click on or pop-ups to block. There aren’t even any photos. There is nothing but a gaping white void covered in tiny, pixelated letters that squirm like ants as your cursor scrolls past. In an age where the internet has become primarily known for its uses as either a mass-marketing machine or a government surveillance system, it is refreshing to see a website without any unnecessary add-ons or features. On a page called “missed connections,” people describe the fleeting moments of love they felt with a stranger in hopes that they may find them again. A man describes a moment of intimate eye contact he shared with a woman in a Whole Foods. Their eyes lingered for what felt like an eternity over two shopping carts stuffed with whole-grain bread and processed meats, then each person set off on their separate way. Star-crossed lovers, separated by the fact that they parked their cars in different spots. Maybe they will meet again, or maybe they were fated to be two ships passing in the night. Meanwhile, in a section titled “moving and relocation,” people leaving Rhode Island bid emotional farewells to their beloved pets, describing their lovable traits in hopes that someone will give them a new home. In another section, an elderly man discovers that he was adopted over half a century ago. After reaching out to a few extended family members to find his biological mother, he learns that she died at a very young age. All he has left of her is a single photograph.

The forums are full of stories like these. They are the lonely moments in life; the moments that often go undocumented and unnoticed. They are all cataloged here, immortalized within the binary code of a digital interface. Here’s a list of some of my favorite finds:

• A 71-year-old woman finds joy in her new job at a puppet museum. Her most frequent visitors are kindergarten children and dementia patients, and she describes being caught in a realm where one group is learning while the other is losing what they have learned.

• An author advertises his book about an

elderly Christian man whose encounter with a rat makes him reconsider everything he believes in. The entire narrative is told through a series of back-and-forth emails. He says it’s based on a true story.

• A woman discovers that her aging father with dementia uses one of her purses to store his old mechanic’s tools. Another man notes that he makes paintings for his mother with Alzheimer’s that depict moments of her life before they fade away.

• A group of senior citizens commemorate their deceased friend named Clusterhead, who died last August from stomach cancer. He was an electrical engineer with a passion for motorcycles. His proverbs and sayings are now quoted regularly on the site. One of my favorites is this:

“Essentially, we’re all like a candle in the wind, one breath away from being extinguished.”

• A group of philosophers discuss the legitimacy of a website called the “Near Death Experience Research Foundation.” It is a page dedicated to the stories and experiences of those who have undergone NDEs (Near Death Experiences). They ultimately conclude that Jesus is a collective hallucination.

• A woman in a failing marriage begins writing haikus. She says it is like knitting for the mind. Here is her first attempt: space

Between toes Sand

• An entire forum is dedicated to people with insomnia talking while they wait for sleep to find them. This often involves teaching one another their favorite childhood nursery rhymes. Some tell stories about their friends and families, while others simply talk about their day.

• A man’s friend passes away with little to no recognition besides a brief obituary in a local newspaper. Known by the community as “Pure Gabby,” he was a kind man with a warm heart. His friend attaches a Spotify link to one of his songs called “Moonlight Lady.” It is now one of my favorite songs.

The Craigslist forums are a sobering glimpse into the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Those lives may be ugly, flawed, or tragic, but they weave a web of the forgotten and the lost, united by their shared desire to be heard. This is not to suggest that the forums are a wholesome, loving community; Craigslist is no paradise. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It’s almost impossible to go five minutes without seeing a fight break out in the replies of a thread, no matter how mundane or inoffensive the subject may be. I am not saying that the internet can recreate the delicate warmth of human touch, or that these people truly found closure on a website used to sell vintage McDonald’s toys and moth-eaten jackets. But I am saying that even here, in the most unlikely of places, there is beauty to be found. I am saying that even in the loneliest of times, even during the days when you are surrounded by friend groups and spike ball nets and you

FINDING LOVE IN THE CRAIGSLIST FORUMS the digital equivalent of turning over rocks to find cool bugs

The Tina Fey Problem

On the tragedy of 2010s feminism

When I was 12, my mom enrolled me in a running group, Girls on the Run, to shock me out of my pubescent laziness. For an hour, 24-year-old coaches would lead us around the track in our pink, Girls-on-the-Run-branded T-shirts. They eventually broke us up into smaller groups once it became obvious that Danielle, who played club soccer, was going to lap Cecilia, who spent all of her free time watching 30 Rock. But, despite my nearly 20-minute mile pace, the program was empowering. After every session, I was a Girl on the Run. Not everyone, I thought, could claim that title.

When I wasn’t running laps inside a brightly-lit gym, I was working my way through a slew of 2010s sitcoms. First it was 30 Rock, which I started watching a couple years after its release in 2006. Then Parks and Recreation in 2009. In 2012, Mindy Kaling’s first solo show, The Mindy Project, was released. Come 2013, Inside Amy Schumer aired and only a year after that, I watched the newly premiered Broad City. I didn’t get around to Girls until later, but I did find the time to read Lena Dunham’s book, Girl. I also read Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please if you couldn’t tell, insufferable as a tween. I was also a Feminist.

Girls on the Run, 30 Rock memoirs I read are artifacts of the type of femi nism that was gaining steam in 2012. Over the next few years, this strain would come to define mainstream feminist media, pollinating airwaves with its girl-power branded messaging, until it met its fatal end following Trump’s election and the Women’s March in 2017. It was focused on putting everything—sexual deviances, traumatic responses, annoying tics, bodily malfunctions, professional disappointments—out on a pink tablecloth and calling for the world to come see. Its method of gaining popularity was to be loud and obnoxious. Beyond that, the comediennes didn’t have much of a plan. +++

Feminism in the 2010s packaged itself simply. It was distilled in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s rulebook, laid out in her 2014 TED Talk-turnedbook-length-essay, We Should All Be Feminists Adichie’s definition of a feminist encapsulates the politics of the time: a feminist is “a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.” It was a simple message, one that made it easy for any middle-school-aged girl to wield the feminism sword without a coherent strategy or politics. “We must do better” was the slogan, but the process of betterment was left undiscussed. It gained its power only in its artic ulation, and it left all of its potential dangling in the modal verb. It was a great rallying call for the

In the first episode of writer Liz Lemon, played by Fey (who created the show), faces off against her new boss: Jack Donaghy, a Donald Trump-type NBC executive played by none other than Alec Baldwin. The next six seasons follow Lemon as she attempts to lead the writer’s room of an eclectic sketch comedy show, based on Fey’s time working as the first female head writer for Saturday Night Live. Through romantic travails, professional disasters, and a number of clumsy accidents, the compact sitcom had an impressive jokesper-minute rate, and it was well-received upon airing. But as much as it was about a woman in a man’s world, it was also about a woman in distress. As Donaghy says in the first episode, Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is as much a powerhouse as she is “a New York third-wave feminist, college educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, overscheduled, undersexed, who buys any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years takes up knitting for … a week.” Liz Lemon eats Cheetos

apologize, she confesses her darkest secrets in a monologue. They include being “sexually rejected by not one, but two guys who later went on to clown college,” having “five donuts so far today,” pooping her pants “a little bit, at an all-you-can-eat country buffet,” and going on a date with her cousin. This is what I’ll call ‘Feyian feminism,’ which will later be picked up by Poehler, who plays an outrageously optimistic public servant on Parks and Rec; by Kaling, who plays an egotistical narcissist on The Mindy Project; and by Dunham, who plays an insufferable Brooklynite on Girls. It is confessional through and through, and its impact arises only from its having been stated. The comedians of this era created a museum of embarrassing femininities, exhibiting various vaginal problems, sexual mishaps, and digestive issues to the impressionable viewer. But behind the installation, there wasn’t much programming.

attendance in Washington. They joined the long lines of women in pussy hats holding signs like “We are not ovary-acting,” “Ninety, nasty, and not giving up,” “Vulva la resistance!” and “This pussy grabs back.” Here was the final breath of the Fey-ian political body. Millions of women threw their nastiness toward the White House. In return, Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade

Women in 2023 have fewer legal rights than the women of 2006. In certain ways, the cultural landscape has changed in their favor—the #MeToo movement transformed social norms that had worked against women, and in some cases women saw justice against their perpetrators, at least through the legal system. But 10 states have banned abortion since the series finale of 30 Rock aired. Title IX protections on campuses were scaled back during the Trump administration, and companies could now choose to deny basic reproductive healthcare coverage based on religious beliefs. The comedians of the decade leading up to Trump’s elec-

tion may have managed to change the landscape of TV, but their feminism didn’t hold up in the fight against actual political threats.

What accounts for this failure? The very essence of the Fey-ian feminism that circulated in the mid-2010s was threatened by anything that didn’t fit neatly into its mold. The growing visibility of trans issues complicated the feminism which relied so heavily on corporeal signifiTIME Magazine’s June cover story featured the actress Laverne Cox with the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point.” “Nearly a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage,” it reads, “another social movement is poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.” Less than a year later, Diane Sawyer’s interview with Caitlyn Jenner in April 2015 brought the topic of transness further into the American

The vapidly grotesque feminism of Dunham and Schumer now faced a major challenge. By continuing to proceed as normal, they risked aligning themselves with the growing trans-exclusive radical feminist (TERF) movement that seemed to champion vaginas over everything else. Journalist Elinor Burkett wrote an op-ed New York Times responding to the 2015 Jenner-Sawyer interview. In it, she bemoans transness for the stereotypes and “boxes” it puts upon femininity. “People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women,” she writes, “shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long.” For Burkett, gender is a laundry list of minutiae, an often very gross and uncomfortable checklist, that each person ticks again and again until she gets enough points to earn the Woman badge. Trans women, Burkett writes, “haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before.” These examples are, truly, 30 Rock episodes. Liz Lemon, in the episode “Jack the Writer,” tries to get an intern to cover up because the male writers are so distracted by her breasts. In “Cooter,” she has a pregnancy scare after a fling with an

that published Burkett’s letter has recently come under fire for its antitrans rhetoric, with nearly 1,000 contributors signing a letter stating that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been inflammatory and anti-factual at a time when trans rights are under attack nationwide. Practically in response, the Times published an op-ed by former Books editor Pamela Paul titled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling,” where Paul claims “nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.” While Rowling has insisted she respects the idea of transness, she has also maintained not only that there is an essential, permanent distinction between cis and trans women, but that institutions—like jails or psychiatric wards—should treat people according to this distinction. Perhaps a more articulated, nuanced feminism could have pushed against this tired, harmful narrative. Instead, old-school feminists like Paul, Rowling, and Adichie—who has made some Rowlingadjacent comments herself in recent years—are enabled to fill in for a feminism left vacant. When challenges to the mission’s very symbol—the vagina—and all that it could not accommodate were posed, its creators gave up on it altogether. They stood up from the table upon which they had thrown everything and farted as they walked away (as Julia Louis-Dreyfus does in Inside Amy Schumer, “The Last Fuckable Day”).

So what remains? Not a lot. As Andrea Long Chu put it in a 2019 n+1 article about her transition and the concept of womanhood, feminism today is in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshiping her somewhat up in the air.

The exclusivity and inflexibility of Fey-ian feminism was what eventually brought the movement to its knees. But the truly insidious effect of a feminism based on divulgence and confessions was that it left little else to be said. Up until recently, there were still taboos to be broken. But now the gas has been passed, the men have been sexually dominated, and the “cunts” have been uttered. The pussy has literally been shown (Girls, Season 5, Episode 7: “Hello Kitty”). So where do we go from here?

I do not lament that the tweenagers of today have no Tina Fey equivalent to worship; the type of feminism that is so focused on enumerating what is has no place in a politics interested in what could be. But I do miss the possibility of a conscious feminism in general. Girls on the Run had plenty of problems, beginning with its name and ending with its intentions, but it did at least create a space of potential feminist action for young girls. And, despite the screed above, I loved 30 Rock, The Mindy Project, Broad City, and the rest. They were great examples of what a feminist media could be like, even if they never managed to hit the mark. Still, an inclusive feminist world relies on there being a feminism in place.

In that same essay, Chu proposes an alternative for our impoverished culture. As she writes in response to cis women who might question

I don’t want what you have, I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself which, who knows.

Fey, Schumer, Dunham, and the rest used a pile of vaginas and bad sex stories as their soapbox. They thought they could negotiate a new feminism by simply adding, at a rapid pace, to what was already there. But Chu says something else. She proposes a feminism borne from the void, from the gap between different women, by the gap within each woman herself.

Amia Srinivasan, a philosopher of sex, puts it similarly in a 2021 New Yorker article:

It is also true that many non-trans women know something of the heartbreak caused by a body that betrays—that weighs you down with unwanted breasts and hips; that transforms you from an agent of action into an object of male desire; that is, in some mortifying sense, not a reflection of who you really are … What might a conversation between women, trans and non, look like if it started from a recognition of such continuities of experience?

These continuities aren’t one-to-one in the way Elinor Burkett would like it; it’s not a matter of comparing my white-pants-period story to your gross-guy-from-Tinder story. It’s a connection which arises from the disconnection we feel between, within, and beyond ourselves.

And perhaps that’s what Fey, Dunham, Schumer, and the rest were trying to get at: a way to articulate the places where ‘womanhood’ fails to fill in the gaps. Rather than searching for a new method, they tried to fill the hole with more of the same, but it only grew with the vulgarity of their jokes. For, as Chu and Srinivasan implore, it’s that gap which defines gender. The gap between what we feel ourselves to be and how we are perceived, the gap between our consciousness and the forms our consciousness clings to. Any feminism that depends upon an imagined connection where meaning transfers seamlessly from one body to the next, one experience to the next, is destined to fail. Any politics, generally, that attempts to connect experience as if experience itself were continuous has failed and will fail, too. A new feminism would make room for the discontinuity. It would depend on its eventual brokenness, like when you see yourself in a window and don’t recognize the reflection. Or like when you think back to yourself a decade ago, running around the indoor track in your 30 Rock merch, and wonder who that girl really was.

CECILIA BARRON B’24 once sat behind Tina Fey at a performance of Annie

The comedians of this era created a museum of embarrassing femininities, exhibiting various vaginal problems, sexual mishaps, and digestive issues to the impressionable viewer.

The truly insidious effect of a feminism based on divulgence and confessions was that it left little else to be said.

Stephen noticed it first at breakfast. It was Tuesday and Tuesday was waffle day. Friday was also waffle day, but on Friday he was allowed to have them with whipped cream. Stephen ran down the stairs and into the kitchen and he smiled; his mother remembered, and hadn’t poured the syrup yet. There was a right way to do it—pouring the syrup. The right way to do it was to pour the syrup on the side of the plate, letting it pool, and then soak the waffle strips—he always cut them into thin, long strips—in the puddle. He chewed on the first syrupy strip and, as soon as he felt there was room, picked up a second and chomped down and then PANG. It hurt! In the back of his mouth, on the top, on the right, it hurt! Stephen bit down and the half-chewed waffle made contact and PANG—it hurt like that!

The pain shot up through his tooth, sharp and instant, a white hot blinding flash firing into his brain. Then an aftershock, throbbing, waves and waves, out from the pulsating tooth, pounding around his mouth and down through his entire body. It thumped into his stomach and he could not breathe. He lurched forward, folding over, hot tears welling in his eyes. PANG

Stephen slowly swallowed the partly-chewed waffle strips and looked to where his mother had been. She was gone. He whipped his head back and forth, scouring the kitchen. Where did she go?

“Okay, honey!” The sweet, warm voice drifted in from the other room. “Time to go!”

She was there, in the living room. She hadn’t left him. To the sweet music of her voice he sank back in his chair and released a deep exhale. Echoes of pain faded from his body and mind as he walked to the door, leaving behind his still-full plate of waffles. +++

In many ways, second grade was better than

first. This year, Stephen was in the same class as Jonah and Jason—they had been separated after kindergarten. Also in the class was Isabelle Natterschiff—beautiful, lovely Isabelle. And since he was in the first reading group, he was allowed to choose his own books during independent reading.

But this year, he had Ms. Bergman. Evil Ms. Bergman. Oh, how mean she was! How cruel and full of spite! Two days before his eighth birthday, she caught Stephen passing a note to Jason during social studies. Class time was for everyone, she said. So if Stephen has something to say, he would have to share with everyone.

As he sat at his desk, finishing his subtraction, Stephen saw her glaring eyes blaze across his memory. He saw the slight upward curl of her thin, papery lips, that serpentine sketch of an almost-smile. Stand up, she had commanded. Read the note aloud. Include the rest of the class. It’s not nice to exclude people. Later that day, she called his parents. He was disruptive, she told them, disruptive and disrespectful. It was a shame for a boy so smart to act in such a way. But it wasn’t true. It was a hideous lie Ms. Bergman told. He was a good boy. His ears turned hot as the hateful memory lingered.

He looked across the room to Isabelle Natterschiff finishing her worksheet. Soon, he pridefully pledged, some day very soon he would tell her how he felt. He did not know if her marriage to Ethan Sonnenfeld still stood— they had held a small, private wedding by the cubbies during afterschool last year—but he would profess his love regardless. Anyway, he knew they couldn’t last, because if they had kids they might be named Sonnenfeld-Natterschiff.

At lunch, Stephen sat with Jonah and Jason, as he always did. He unzipped his lunchbox, and set his eyes upon the turkey sandwich, apple slices, yogurt, and Goldfish his mother had packed for him. Turkey sandwiches were gross, but he promised his mother he would eat them.

Stephen jammed his mouth full of Goldfish. PANG. Oh lord, there it was. That quick and sharp, then long and wide, PANG, there and all at once, then everywhere—PANG

Shock subsiding, Stephen lifted his hands to hold his face, pressing down on his cheek above the afflicted tooth. Jonah and Jason gave him a strange look.

“My tooth hurts,” Stephen said through muffled groans.

“Maybe you have a cavity,” said Jonah. A cavity? It couldn’t be a cavity. He always brushed his teeth. He never missed a day. He was diligent; he was precise; he always went the full two minutes—he had a little hourglass that timed it; he

made sure to hit every spot; he didn’t rush; he didn’t even complain. He couldn’t have a cavity.

“My mom had twelve cavities,” said Jason. “She said she was always at the dentist. And every time they would stick a needle in her mouth and then drill her tooth.”

Stephen looked at his friend through widened eyes.

“She said it really hurt.” Jason leaned back and crossed his legs. “She cried every time.”

Stephen dumped the rest of his lunch into the garbage.

+++

Stephen had a problem. After lunch, the pain hadn’t gone away. He tried to ignore it, to pay it no mind, but there it remained, that little pang, slowly chanting in the back of his mouth. He played tag at afterschool. Pang. He did his homework. Pang

At dinner he barely touched his food. He told his mother he wasn’t hungry. His father told him he needed to eat so he would grow. He said he was sorry. Pang.

He couldn’t have a cavity. It would go away.

+++

Stephen had gone to Hebrew school every Saturday morning since he was four. This year, his parents made him go after school on Wednesdays, too. On Wednesdays, it was just the older kids.

This week, Rabbi Kessler talked about Moses. They all knew the story, how Moses had led the Jews out of Egypt, through the desert, to the promised land. But they were old enough now to learn about a more complicated chapter.

When the Jews had almost reached the promised land, after forty years of wandering, they ran out of water. So God told Moses: speak to a rock and water will appear. But Moses got impatient. He hit the rock with his staff instead of speaking to it. And so God punished him, and did not let him enter the promised land. Stephen couldn’t believe it. They were so close and it had been so many years and Moses had done so much and right as they were about to make it, he wasn’t allowed to go.

“He died without ever stepping foot in the promised land,” the rabbi said sadly.

It seemed so cruel, so mean and unfair.

Pang

Stephen’s mother walked him home from Hebrew school. He was eight now, so he usually did not hold her hand anymore when they walked in public. He held it tight today.

He couldn’t have a cavity. Cavities were for kids who were bad and didn’t brush their teeth. Dr. Gursky, his dentist, always told him he brushed so well. Dr. Gursky had a funny accent because he was from a country in Europe. Stephen couldn’t remember which one. Maybe Siberia. Pang +++

That night, Stephen got in bed at nine o’clock sharp, like he was supposed to. He made sure to be exactly on time. Once the lights were out, his mother sang him a song and kissed him goodnight.

“One more?” he asked.

His mother ran her hand through his hair.

“Tomorrow, sweet boy,” she said. “It’s late.”

She turned away and left, slipping out the door. The room grew cold.

Pang

He hadn’t told her about his tooth. If he told her, she would make him go see Dr. Gursky. And if he saw Dr. Gursky, he might find a cavity. It was better to pretend nothing was wrong. Maybe tomorrow, the pain would be gone. It was worse today than it was yesterday, but tomorrow it might be gone. He shut his eyes so tight and tried to push, push, push the thoughts away. To will himself to sleep. Then he saw Dr. Gursky, the shiny scalp under a thin patina of once-black hair, the little wire-rimmed glasses, sticking that rounded pointy shiny metal tool up into his gums. A hot tingling trickled down his arms and lingered in his hands. He couldn’t have a cavity. How could he have a cavity?

Pang

In his heart, Stephen knew. What else could it be? A hot, freezing, furious terror beset his bones and he sprang out of bed. He had a cavity. But why? He did everything he was supposed to do. He didn’t understand! So he would pray. Yes! He would pray, and beg God to take the cavity away. He would explain to God that he was good and that there must have been a mistake and he was not supposed to get cavities. That there was no one less deserving. Stephen stood facing the window—he thought that way might be east—and began to pray.

As he prayed, he remembered Moses. He remembered how terribly God punished him when he struck the rock. That one bad thing. And he realized: he was being punished. Somehow, he, Stephen, had aroused the righteous, furious wrath of the divine. He had angered God and God smote him with a hole in the tooth in the back of his mouth. But what had he done? He was good. He tried to be good. Why had he been cursed?

Stephen looked up and he thought about his mother. He thought about how sometimes he wasn’t nice to her. Sometimes he wouldn’t listen. Last week, he snuck downstairs and he went on the iPad and stayed up until 11:00. When his mother had woken him the next morning, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t get out of bed. His mother yelled. He was going to be late for school! she said. And he was; he was late for school. He walked in at 8:34, morning meeting was already over, reading had started, and Ms. Bergman, cruel Ms. Bergman, she gave him the most evil look. Oh, how he hated Ms. Bergman, the odious witch. But oh, oh, oh! She was his teacher! He was supposed to listen to her! And he tried, he really tried. But she was so dreadful, so mean and terrible. He didn’t mean to disrupt. He didn’t mean to make things difficult. He said he hated school, that he wished he could never go again, but he didn’t really mean it. He liked reading and sometimes he even liked science.

Stephen felt a heat kindle in his soul and he looked up to the sky and imagined God there, a mighty cloud above his house. He remembered his misdeeds and the times he had been bad; they flashed through his mind and he knew that God had seen them, all of them. The heat inside swelled and grew; it welled up from his stomach and through his chest; and he felt his chest constrict, pulled down toward his stomach, tightening, tightening.

Under the weight that pressure broke; and from the depths sprang a cry so deep and powerful he could feel it rise past his lungs and leap through his throat. But when it left his lips, that weighty mass of fiery fear, thrust from the anguish of his soul, that deluge—when it left his mouth it crumpled, it collapsed and

vaporized into thin air.

Stephen could only muster a whimper. His lower lip began to quiver and his chest began to shake, emitting a series of little pants, short and shallow. Tears welled up in his eyes and, one by one, fell, scalding, down his face. One tear rolled down his nose and crested over his top lip, landing in his mouth. And with his tongue he felt his tooth and the pain, which, in his moment of terror, he forgot, came once again bounding to the fore.

PANG PANG PANG PANG—his tooth wailed from the back of his mouth. It shook and shuddered and danced around, howling its anguished cry. It throbbed and ached and Stephen could not help but wilt under its weight.

PANG PANG PANG

That horrible noise, that clangor of panging. Oh, how it hurt him; oh, how he ached. He lay on the floor and rolled around. Landing on his side, he closed his eyes and spoke to God.

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered. “I’m sorry, God. I know I don’t always listen. I don’t listen to mommy. I talk in class. I stole some candy from the cabinet and hid it in the Lego Batcave.”

He curled up into a ball beside his bed.

“But I try,” he keened. “I try to be good. And I promise. I will never be bad again. I swear. I swear.”

Over and over, he said it. “I swear, I swear.” Again and again the words left his mouth, their meaning receding, dissolving into sheer recitation.

His body tired and his fervor cooled; his panting slowed and the panging in his mouth quieted. Stephen pulled a pillow from his bed and hugged it tight, drifting into sleep.

+++

His mother found him in the morning, curled up on the floor. She gently awoke him. He stirred and yawned and, opening his eyes, pain and God and teeth and fire and PANG came flooding back into his brain. His body again filled with terror and he burst into chittering sobs. He told her everything.

“Oh, honey.” His sweet mother held him close. “We’ll go see Dr. Gursky as soon as we can.”

+++

The hot bright white light scorched down on Stephen as the dentist’s chair whirred backward and his pounding bellicose heart thumped war songs in his chest. Dr. Gursky looked down at him. One eye was squinty, the other big and bulging behind the tiny round glasses. He had even less hair than last time, just two colorless fuzzy patches on the sides of his shiny head.

“Okay, Mr. Stephen,” he said in his Siberi an accent, smiling. Stephen wondered why his teeth were so yellow. “We are going to take a look around to see if we find a cavity.”

He put a bulky, boxy pair of sunglasses over Stephen’s eyes and cranked up the light.

“Open up wide.”

Stephen meekly complied.

“Wider.”

He couldn’t go wider.

“Gnaaaaaaagh,” Stephen groaned.

Dr. Gursky placed his icy gloved hands on Stephen’s face and pulled his mouth ajar.

“Ngyaaaaaag!”

The dentist reached his hands through Stephen’s gaping jaw. He dug around through teeth and gum with his pointy probe, sticking

his mirror into the back of Stephen’s throat. Stephen wanted to gag. The metal hook tapped and clicked against the hard enamel. The sharp edge poked and prodded between the gaps in his teeth and nudged in the grooves of his molars. PANG PANG PANG PANG PANG. The metal tapped against the second to last tooth on the top-right of his mouth.

“There it is,” the voice with the accent said.

Stephen’s chest collapsed in despair. Oh, how right he’d been. He imagined all he might have done better, but there was nothing to be done. He had misbehaved and now he would have to pay. He splayed across the reclined chair, submitting.

“We are going to have to fill the cavity,” the dentist said, pulling his tools from Stephen’s mouth.

When Dr. Gursky lifted his hand again, Stephen saw the long, thin needle. His soul arose in violent revolt. He wanted to gnaw and writhe and thrash about, to pound his fists across the bald man’s face. But he could not—he had to be brave. He gripped the armrests, digging his nails into the plastic, holding himself still. He would not cry again.

“You will not feel,” the Siberian offered with equanimity.

There was a slight pinching tweak in his gum and the gleaming needle was pulled from his mouth.

“See? Not so bad.”

The right side of his mouth slipped into numbness and Dr. Gursky lifted a tiny drill.

“You will barely feel.”

But that was a lie. A heinous and terrible lie. The drill drilled on and it buzzed in Stephen’s mouth—humming, fizzing, whirring susurration. It zapped its zipping whiz vibrations, metallic electricity, power puncturing into his buzzing tooth. The drill sent pulses through his body; he shuddered to its buzzing rhythm. Static shocks ran through him, from his teeth to the ends of his fingers and toes.

The furious buzzing ceased.

“All done.”

All done?

The door swung open and Stephen heard the touch of gentle footsteps.

“Oh, my poor baby.”

He opened his eyes to see his mother standing beside the dental surgeon.

“No more cavity for little Stephen,” the Siberian reported. “He is a very brave boy. He +++

At school the next day, Ms. Bergman assigned everyone new seats. Stephen’s new spot was just one seat away from Isabelle Natterschiff. During reading, he finished his chapter early. He peeked over at Isabelle, her hair in a long braid, diligently scanning the pages of her book. Oh, he couldn’t wait any longer! He ripped a page out of his notebook and began scribbling a

“Five more minutes, everyone.”

Stephen jolted to attention. Ms. Bergman was looking right at him; he could feel the burn of her gaze. He pretended to read. After a moment, he glanced up. Ms. Bergman had turned her back. His body bubbled with frenzied frightened glee as he finished writing the note. He looked back at Isabelle, who met his eyes.

Stephen smiled.

JONATHAN GREEN B’25 should floss more.

Set in Stone?

We worked under the black tarp shading us from the sun. We arrived at the site early in the morning to avoid the heat—by the time we left in the middle of the day, the temperature had reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Donning my garden gloves and cheap clothing, I crouched on some knee pads, hacking away in the trench. I got my assignment from the director: continue my work digging up tesserae (ceramic blocks used to make mosaics) and pieces of building material, typical findings at a Western Roman villa site. Layer by layer, we uncovered the remains of the villa, unearthing pieces of the former settlement.

Like many others interested in the field, images of Indiana Jones and his pursuits (however fantastical) sparked my fascination for archaeology when I was younger. After taking an archaeology class my sophomore year, I chose to spend my summer on a dig in Western Europe. The idea that I could be the first person to touch a vase or mosaic in centuries was thrilling. Physical objects seemed to me to hold a certain potency that could not be found in other fields, like history, which focus on written or oral records. An artifact meant proof of civilization, of the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago. I was fascinated by the objects of our past because, to me, they were imbued with a sort of objectivity and absolutism that could not be found elsewhere.

But there is nothing absolute about the way we produce meaning around the objects of our past. The role of the archaeologist is not always, if ever, one of an objective researcher applying the scientific method. The reasons why an individual chooses to do archaeology and study the ancient world, as well as their position in relation to the people and cultures they are studying, ultimately shape the stories they tell; and, thus, the way we conceive of our past, situate ourselves in the present, and understand who we—and “others”—are.

Those who are able to claim authority over these stories are those who have asserted owner ship over the recovered artifacts themselves. This ownership is a contested question in the field of archaeology, and its complexity is nowhere more visible than in the world of museums.

+++

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), whose construction began in 2005 but was delayed by political and economic instability, is slated to open this year near the pyramids of Giza outside Cairo. It emerges from Egypt’s extensive history of archeological research, and will contain one of the largest collections of Egyptian artifacts in the world: all 5,000 artifacts found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922, as well as 100,000 other objects from Egypt’s long history. The building cost about $1 billion to build. The museum will provide visitors a glimpse into thousands of years of Egyptian history within a larger context that museums in Europe and the United States cannot provide.

As a kid, visiting a museum was nothing more than an exciting adventure to be shared with my family. Museums were places where I could visit to witness and learn about things I would otherwise never have had a chance to see. Regardless of your position on the ethics of displaying artifacts, you have to admit how incredible it is that we can see objects of the distant past and learn about people who lived such a long time ago. Walking through the RISD Museum as a child, I saw the little hippopotamus from Egypt, the wooden Buddha from Japan, and I knew that these places were real, that people

existed hundreds of years ago and held these objects.

But these objects are more than snapshots from a static moment in time—they were created under the backdrop of Ptolemaic Egypt, or Heian Period Japan, and carry with them the context and human emotions that went into making them. And the history of the places and people that created them continued on. Modern Japan is built on Heian Period Japan; they are not separate entities with different histories. This interconnectedness and continuity is what makes the display and study of artifacts so complex.

How does ownership play a role in archaeology? When you take a step back, it can be quite jarring to think about possession of objects that were made by people thousands of years ago—can anyone today really be a rightful owner if there was no consensual exchange of ownership? If someone from 1000 BCE can’t give their amulet to a modern archaeologist, then can it really be passed on? When objects have been lying in the dirt for so long, they can begin to appear as symbols of the past—remnants of the lives of previous owners, but ultimately a part of our time, not theirs.

Museum Act of 1963 prohibits the return of artifacts except under very specific circumstances—only if they are “duplicates” or “unfit to be retained in the collections of the museum.” By housing an entire collection of exclusively Egyptian artifacts, the GEM offers one answer to the question of repatriation by situating artifacts in their cultural context—rather than fitting them into a narrative created by historically colonial institutions. But the complexities of making meaning around objects do not stop at the question of their ownership.

+++

You may think of archaeology in an idealized light, with researchers toiling away in the dirt to produce perfect specimens from ancient times, ready to be displayed behind a glass case in a museum. But the reality is much less glamorous. Most archaeological finds are not put on display, but rather cataloged and studied for research. An archaeologist may study the type of pottery found on a site to find out where and when the pottery was made, or the coins, which can provide some temporal context. After a site is excavated, it can never be recreated—the remains of the past, once stuck in the ground, become objects of the present.

In this sense, who is conducting archaeological research matters. It is impossible to rid oneself of implicit predispositions and prejudices. A person’s motivations for studying archaeology, the things they have learned in school and in the field, how they are situated in the society in which they are working—these all come together to shape the stories that come from archaeological research. Although many finds won’t end up in a museum for the public to view, they will be studied by researchers who then go on to publish their findings and teach at universities.

The researchers who study findings of dig sites are the ones who are making the stories, producing the knowledge that shapes our worldviews and ideas of lineage and culture. These stories are a reflection of those writing them, products of our time as much as they are products of the past. An archaeologist studying the remnants of a dig site may apply constructed ideas of the past that do not hold true to its reality.

We value the idea of ‘objectivity’ because it allows us the illusion of an uncomplicated and unambiguous relationship between the artifact and ourselves. To see archaeology as an objective science requires us to ignore the emotional ties people can have to these articles of their histories and cultures. Archaeology is important precisely because we know the significance of the objects we are excavating—so we cannot ignore this significance when deciding what to do with the artifacts, and where to place them.

The Rosetta Stone, one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history, is currently held at the British Museum. Calls to repatriate the Stone are based on its “illegal” extrication from Egypt by vying colonial forces: it was discovered during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1799 and appropriated by the French. When the British defeated Napoleon in 1801, the Stone was handed over to Britain under the Treaty of Alexandria. This extrication stands in opposition to examples of consensual displays of Egyptian artifacts abroad, cases where the Egyptian government has given items to foreign countries and museums, such as the Southern Obelisk in Paris. One can easily refute patronizing arguments that Egypt is not responsible enough to safeguard such important goods and that the British Museum would be able to better protect them—that the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo safely holds invaluable artifacts like the gold mask of King Tutankhamun.

The famous archaeologist Dr. Zahi Hawass, former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, created a petition demanding the Stone and other artifacts be sent back to Egypt. Another petition, called “Repatriate Rashid,” was created by a group of Egyptian archaeologists calling for Egypt’s prime minister himself to request that the British Museum return it. But the British

What do we do, then, if the study of the past is so shaped by the present and by our human perspectives? “Objectivity” is often seen as the gold standard, but in a field where humans are interacting with the remnants of another human’s life, subjectivity is impossible (and undesirable) to avoid. What we end up doing with archaeological artifacts should depend on the specific historical, social, and cultural context in which they are dug up.

The fact that we view artifacts subjectively, that we have emotional and cultural ties to these objects, is precisely why we value them and the whole field of archaeology in the first place. To ignore this subjectivity is to ignore the reason why we do archaeology, and why we put artifacts on display for all to see.

We must acknowledge our constructed worldviews and think critically about why we are doing archaeology—or any study for that matter—and what knowledge will be produced by this act. Knowledge produces knowledge. The narratives that emerge from archaeological studies are part of the production of public knowledge, which shapes our education, our politics, and the decisions we make in our everyday lives.

PAULINE GREGORY B’24 wants to visit the Grand Egyptian Museum.

PAULINE GREGORY

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLA WATSON

Ethical dilemmas in the field of archaeology

Vicente B’24 and Sylvie Bartusek B’24

Kayleen

Unititled Zine

Marker, pen, watercolor pencils, acrylic paint, stamps, magazine & paper collage

This is a piece of translations—translations between languages, between modes of expression and between people. Kayleen Vicente first wrote the poem on her own in Portuguese, then translated it into English as a way to allow her close friends to connect to her. Sylvie Bartusek then illustrated the poem while spending time with Kayleen. Both artists worked together to break the poem’s structure into the zine form, asking each other questions about the piece’s concepts and symbolism. The two artists work in the moment, creating first and unpacking after. While translations are imperfect, they behave here as acts of love and understanding.

Pouring over Providence

A critical encounter with community around coffee shops, told by those within

On n the kind of wet January day you learn to tolerate in Rhode Island, I found myself careening down Wickenden on foot, ritually reciting my name and an apologetic introduction. I had been assigned for a class to interview a stranger on the street for ten minutes—a lofty task for an introvert—and was prepared to speak with almost anyone who would agree to it.

In a troubled haze I entered The Shop, a café on a quieter part of the street. The space was small, oriented around a communal wooden table and lit by the day’s flat light. White noise from the espresso machine filled the spaces between the shop’s few inhabitants: a young mother with a stroller, a student with a laptop, two un-uniformed employees moving behind the bar. I ordered a chai from one of them, a young red-haired woman with whom I shared a first name. We exchanged smiles and pleasantries until I worked up the courage to tell her why I’d walked in.

“JP, you wanna take this?” She gestured toward a man working behind her at the espresso machine. “He likes to chat,” she said. Wiping down a counter, JP asked how long the interview would take; there were only two of them working, and he didn’t want to leave Cam alone too long. I told him I’d keep it short. On a bench outside, I learned quickly that getting incisive quotes from JP wouldn’t require much exertion on my end. Eventually, I asked him what kept him going in the business. He considered the question for a moment before answering definitively.

“It’s an intact form of communication. It’s something that you don’t get in many spaces. And there’s real community around that,” JP said. “Everyone talks about, ‘well, community, blah blah blah,’ as an amorphous, abstract concept, and I’m like, ‘no, dude, it’s just real in places like this.’ But American coffee culture is fast food culture. It’s Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and gas stations. But this still has a space. And this is an intact thing, you know?”

I left my first conversation with JP feeling ferociously optimistic about the state of the world and the trajectory of my life. Under the guise of the quotidian, local coffee shops offered something radical; they were progressive enclaves and beacons of community in an increasingly placeless world. Trudging through the damp back to campus, I was legitimately on the verge of tears, and resolved to write a nice, heart-warming article about finding belonging in shared spaces.

When I pitched the idea to my editors, I received a long reply back. They enjoyed the idea and thought it had a lot of potential. But, they wondered, rather than take for granted that coffee shops are the intact forms of community I posit them to be, could I grapple with the tensions between community-building and power within these spaces? At the end of the day, these were for-profit business ventures where prices were set, workspaces where wages were earned.

It was a damning blow to my visions of a mutualistic haven, made worse by the fact that the added nuance was intelligent and true. I recalled the specialty coffee shops that had

proliferated in Harlem, augurs of gentrification in a neighborhood out of which my mother was forced to move. I considered the now wellknown national union struggles across coffee chains and shops. Optimism be damned—how could “real community” exist under these conditions? And for whom?

In the weeks that followed, I spoke with owners, managers, workers, and customers in coffee shops across Providence. At the beginning, I felt as though I had been charged with some great moral interrogation that would end with a determination of whether or not coffee shops could be places where “real community” existed—an assumption that, by the end, I would learn was yet another over-simplification on my part.

+++

Community Within

How does community exist in a business enterprise?

The first floor of Coffee Exchange is a caricatured patchwork of café dwellers. In one corner, a student frantically unburdens their fingers onto a keyboard. In another, a millennial couple

leans over their pastries, rapt in indiscernible conversation. Near the door, an octogenarian sits with the crossword while peering over their nose through horn-rimmed glasses. (Later, when I ask Charlie, the owner, how to spot a regular, he offers cryptic advice: “Don’t focus only on gray-haired people. But, you know, don’t avoid ‘em either.”) By the wall, a woman has just opened her laptop and sips a tall latte. When I introduce myself, she offers an inquisitive smile, and tells me her name is Amanda.

Amanda hasn’t been to the café since before the pandemic—the space just reopened its indoor seating in November—but used to come regularly. She works from home, like a quarter of American employees, and seeks out cafés as frequently as she can. Laptop shut now, she tells me what the spaces mean to her. “A couple times a week makes a big difference for—frankly, for my mental health. Even though I’m not talking to anybody. It’s odd how much we as humans need to be in that kind of environment.”

Every shop I visit, customer after customer tells me the same thing: in one way or another, they find community here, in these places where warm goods are sold. Even if they speak to no one, even if they come alone—there’s something about the space that provides a ritual feeling of belonging.

In my own travels across the city these past few weeks, I’ve bought my fair share of hot chais and pastries. Of course, I’ve felt it too. For a moment, I am not a customer, but a neighbor; and this is not a transaction, but a familiar communication that just happens to require the exchange of fungible materials. The vitality of a specialty coffee shop is dependent upon this kind of ideological conversion. These are spaces that seem to reject the conditions of their existence in favor of something more communal.

When I sit down with JP again, a month after our first conversation, he puts a name to the qualities that Amanda and I both grasped at. “It’s what they call a third space,” he tells me. We’re perched across from each other, he on a stair step and I on a bench, inside The Shop just after closing time. “You know, you have your home, your work, and then the third space. You’re not going there for just a specific thing. You’re going to spend time. Coffee shops have always been third spaces.”

Third spaces are a concept constructed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg who argued that sites of public gathering—parks, barber shops, libraries, and, yes, coffee shops—are critical for civic engagement and belonging. The health of American community, he contended in the late ’80s, hinges on their preservation. In the 2000 book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam points out that third spaces have been in decline in the U.S. for decades now.

At the counter, a touch screen asks for my signature and tells me I owe $5.75 for my chai. I wince.

What does it mean when the “third space” in question requires a buy-in?

“We built the place in a spreadsheet, you know—we’re not not business-oriented,” JP admits to me. Still, he insists that profits are hardly at the helm of The Shop’s operations. “We had established our founding principles early on…We have three, and none of them are about maximizing revenue.”

Two owners I speak to, including JP, tell me they’re operating at the fiscal margin. “Being a space where people talk and spend time doesn’t drive revenue,” JP says. Some owners, at least, seem okay with that. “To be engaged in a business like this, I needed there to be a real foundation or reason for it to exist beyond the transactional selling of caffeine,” he says.

But there are hard limits to this philosophy. Not every coffee shop owner is able to afford the financial risk of operating at this margin. And even for those who can, the need to generate at least some revenue repeatedly forces coffee shop owners to compromise their community-centric values. Chloe, a worker-owner at White Electric Coffee Co-op, has reckoned with this challenge alongside her colleagues.

“It is hard when you need to make the money and also be this welcoming space,” she tells me. “We definitely struggled with that ourselves…We’ve had to raise prices just like everyone, because inflation is horrible. But we really held off for a while. We were just losing money and we’re like, we can’t—we had to do it. And it felt horrible.”

Chloe’s dilemma speaks to a deep complication in the kinds of third spaces given attention in America: mutualistic as they may feel, you have to pay up to join in. True, as Chloe later

points out to me, a dollar or two for the cheapest menu option is a relatively small buy-in for a place where you can sit and stay for a day. But there are often other buy-ins required of customers—cultural ones—that pose similar problems.

Back at The Shop, JP and I are still discussing these complexities well past closing time. At one point, a man walks into the shop, coffee mug in hand. “Don, we’re closed, brother,” JP tells him. “If there’s still coffee in that pot it’s yours.” There isn’t any left, and as the man leaves, the two exchange friendly barbs.

JP turns back to our conversation. “There are a lot of things in coffee culture that can put some downward pressure on [community],” he notes. “Like saying, ‘oh, either you’re like one of us or you’re not.’”

(self-professed) valley-girl cadence. “That’s me,” she says when I tell her I’m looking for Chloe, and she offers me a coffee. I tell her apologetically that it would be my third cup of the day.

Chloe is the first worker I have spoken to since beginning my interviews, and as a worker-owner, even she is only partially so. Every worker I have introduced myself to has told me that they needed to speak to their manager before having a conversation with me. In one instance, an owner flat out refused my request to speak with any of his workers. “I don’t have my employees do interviews,” he insisted.

The same owner later agreed to sit down with me himself. We spoke for a long time about the community that existed within the shop; it was something he was very proud of. His refusal still fresh in mind, I tried to divert the conversation.

“And within your workforce,” I suggested, “do you feel like you try to create community there too?” He looked at me quizzically and furrowed his brows, sincerely considering my proposition. “I don’t think there’s any difference,” he said finally. “I think we approach customers and employees the same way. We’re all part of the same family, you know?”

I ask him to elaborate. He tells me about a café in his hometown of Pittsburgh, a “selfstyled counter-culture coffee shop” with an outward anti-capitalist brand. “They have business neighbors who are, you know, baby boomers. And I would watch as the person behind the counter would look and see someone they thought was like them and treat them very hospitably. And then someone who doesn’t look like them, who doesn’t fit the counter-culture image, would get treated completely differently.”

For one, political aesthetics seem to be as much a part of the specialty coffee shop business model as the coffee itself. But more importantly, these ‘aesthetics’ can be boiled down to two fundamental forces: race and class. The leftist, counter-culture ‘aesthetic’ is disproportionately white and college-educated, as are most of the customers in the coffee shops I visit, as are every single employee and owner I speak to—even in one of the most diverse cities in the country.

Coffee shops sell the idea of community well—and often do a genuinely effective job providing it to their patrons. But the community created, it seems, is usually a carefully-curated subset of the one that surrounds it, bound by constraints that cannot be easily shaken.

+++

How does community exist in a workspace?

The interior of White Electric, a worker-owned cooperative, looks exactly how you would hope and expect it to. Plants abound; a community board sprawls across an entire wall, while Black Lives Matter posters and pro-union t-shirts are mounted on another. At the counter, I’m greeted by a woman with curly blond hair and a

Every cafe owner I spoke to offered a similarly earnest account of their familial relationship with their employees. JP tells me about monthly staff dinners and celebratory meals after good business days. “Those were never team building exercises. They were just a way to be ourselves in a different way together…a way for me to actually not just be the business owner.” Neal, owner of Rise ‘n Shine, offers a similar perspective: “They’re called managing baristas. They have a stake in the place,” he tells me at a table outside his café.

These are workspaces that posit themselves as being revolutionarily familial—non-hierarchical, even—in an industry infamous for the maltreatment of its employees. It was an enticing idea, and I didn’t doubt the intentions of any of the owners I spoke to. But I wondered how a worker’s perspective might diverge.

Chloe began as a worker at White Electric nearly 20 years ago, long before the shop became a cooperative. In 2020, in line with cultural shifts induced by the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, Chloe and her co-workers signed a letter to their boss, the café’s owner, with a list of long-brewing complaints: racially discriminatory hiring practices, a lack of sick days, wheelchair inaccessibility. When he retaliated by threatening to fire everyone who had signed on, they decided to form an independent union—and succeeded.

Then, on the day of the celebration, something strange happened: “We went back to the park where we had a bunch of our meetings. We were having cake, we were all excited,” she tells me. “And then that night we got an email from the owner saying ‘I’ve put the shop up for sale.’”

Chloe and her colleagues had mused about the idea of a worker-owned co-op model, but before that moment they had never practically considered it. They were forced to shift gears quickly: “It was probably like within a day,” Chloe says. In the months that followed, they crowdsourced the funds necessary for a down payment on the shop—relying mostly on hundreds of small donations of around $50.

Chloe’s dilemma speaks to a deep complication in the kinds of third spaces given attention in America: mutualistic as they may feel, you have to pay up to join in.

Chloe notes that when White Electric unionized and became a co-op, it wasn’t yet popular to do so. In the years since, coffee shops have been at the helm of a national labor movement responding to low wages and harsh working conditions. White Electric was the first unionized café in Rhode Island; this past summer, Seven Stars’ union gained voluntary recognition from their owners, and an unsuccessful attempt was made at a Warwick Starbucks, as the College Hill Independent previously reported. “Now it’s become more common, but it was a really big deal at the time,” Chloe says. “So I’m still very proud of what we’re doing.”

Since their transformation in 2021, the work at White Electric hasn’t come without challenges. But Chloe says that the business is more transparent, more democratic, and much more diverse—on the whole, “a more sustainable business model.”

The healthier working community seems to have deepened the sense of community within the entire shop. “I think customers have a sense of that. It feels nice to go into a place where you’re like, ‘oh, people aren’t, like, miserable here,’ Which is totally valid…because that is very much a very valid reality in many places,” she says. “It feeds into each other—having it be a nice community behind the counter, we’re able to hopefully share that on the other side of the counter too.”

The unionization movement makes clear that there is a severe lack of congruence between the communal values offered to patrons by cafés and those granted to workers—though the baristas’ organizing work seems to point toward a different future. Some of the most authentic communities that exist in coffee shops, perhaps, are built from the efforts that ensue.

Community Without

How do coffee shops change the communities that surround them?

When the Fishbein family set up shop in ’84, it was, as far as one sibling can recall, the first café in the area.

“We opened up…on New Year’s Day, 1984…We said we can make [the business] with strictly coffee and we can grow with the neighborhood—the neighborhood wasn’t so built up as it is now,” Charlie Fishbein tells me. “And we started with a hundred pounds of coffee.”

Today, Coffee Exchange is a mainstay of Fox Point, a neighborhood that once comprised a self-sustaining immigrant community and now is swelled with boutiques and specialty restaurants. With over 1000 reviews on Google, Coffee Exchange is also arguably the most popular café in Providence.

When I visit Coffee Exchange, Charlie seems reluctant to speak with me—he doesn’t usually do interviews—but eventually agrees. On a Thursday morning, we sit down in his office upstairs, the only quiet space in the café. He’s a soft-spoken man with a New England accent, neat white hair, and a cautious demeanor. As I ask him about the past, the shop, and his family, his face softens and he eases into his

seat. He offers up a story about their reopening just three months prior.

“I had customers come in, and everyone was afraid that the place was gonna be different. It was gonna be like every other new place,” Charlie says to me. “And it wasn’t really—we made a few changes…but basically it’s the same. And customers came in and cried. It was a beautiful thing to happen and people, every day, all day long, are coming up to me congratulating me on what we did here.”

For the sake of disclosure: I do frequent Coffee Exchange (a lot). And I do, like many customers there, find some distinct comfort in the soft-green shingles, the old wood floors, the unmistakable feeling that there’s a cat lurking around somewhere (there isn’t, but there should be). The shop is quite literally a home and was one long before it housed roasters and espresso machines.

Prior to interviewing Charlie, I had heard about Johnny and Fama Britto through the work of filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, creator of Some Kind of Funny Porto-Rican?. The couple lived in the house now owned by Coffee Exchange until they—along with countless other Cape Verdean families and businesses in the Fox Point community—were displaced from their home in a wave of development projects. When I ask Charlie about who lived here before, he mentions the Brittos—he thinks there’s a plaque or a photograph somewhere outside that pays tribute to them. “Somebody sent us a note [saying] ‘this is where I was born.’ It was 1907 or something.”

Cafés like Coffee Exchange function as an anchoring force because place, as much as time, changes around them. These shops have sticking power in large part, perhaps, because the surrounding neighborhood must contort to their presence.

I ask Amanda if she has noticed cafés act as a displacing force in Providence. “Well, unfortunately, I do think [Seven Stars] did displace an old Italian-style bakery that was already kind of past its heyday.” But, she says, “I think people’s tastes changed. My observation was more that it came in at a time when those other types of businesses had lost their appeal to the communities…I don’t feel like it gentrified the area, really. I’m sure to some degree that happens.”

Looking specifically to Coffee Exchange, Amanda notes the effect the shop has had on Wickenden. “I’ve watched this strip here looking pretty sad for a while,” she says. “And it’s definitely brought in new businesses because of the activity of a coffee shop.”

Data attests to the fact that coffee shops are associated with gentrification. A study by the Harvard Business School found that “the entry of a new coffee shop into a zip code in a given year is associated with a 0.5 percent increase in housing prices,” though it does not conclude whether they function as symptoms or catalysts. So it’s not a question of whether or not coffee shops are part of the process that changes neighborhoods; instead, it’s a question of their role within it, functioning in tandem with other forces.

When I ask Charlie if, over the past forty years, he ever worried about the development of Fox Point displacing low-income residents, he considers the question thoughtfully again. “I don’t recall,” he says after some time. “I’m sure I felt that way. Or I was curious about it, but I don’t recall focusing on it at all. As long as there are people coming, I mean… students take over so much of the apartments along the street. It just didn’t affect us, you know?” I pay closer attention, looking toward those other forces. “There’ll always be students,” he repeats.

How do people conceptualize the responsibility of the coffee shop to its community?

The Fishbeins moved their business into Coffee Exchange some time after the Britto family was displaced from their home. Still, the founding of Coffee Exchange is temporally situated in the middle of a long history of city-planned development in the Fox Point area. Charlie confirms that before the café’s founding, the shops on the street were fewer, and certainly less boutique-y.

Amanda, long-time patron of Coffee Exchange and Seven Stars (which has been around for over 20 years), accounts for the change that these cafés have brought upon their neighborhoods.

“Interestingly, over the past 20 years, the coffee shops tend to stay; when other restaurants or businesses turn over, the coffee shops do tend to provide an anchor that the community kind of builds around,” she says.

Neal, owner of newly established Rise ‘n Shine, is a loquacious man with bushy brows and unruly white hair. When we speak, we spend as much time as anything else discussing the physical space the café is housed in; he’s proud of it, and for good reason. Neal has remodeled the old carriage house into an exuberantly welcoming space with white-shingle walls, exposed brick, and cozy pink accenting. By trade Neal is a professional contractor and real estate owner, and he tells me he owns several properties in Smith Hill—where he’s lived for 40 years now.

The website for Rise ‘n Shine touts that it “intends to jump start new life” into Smith Hill, a neighborhood it describes as “an incredible hidden enclave of the city.” A quick search on Google tells me that Smith Hill’s poverty and unemployment rates are above city averages. It’s also one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Providence.

“The idea of communities getting to participate in their own revitalization and not just the wealthiest land-owning portion of those communities getting to make decisions about things is super appealing,” [JP] says. But you just don’t see that happening— at least not in Providence.

When I ask Neal about the website, he tells me the neighborhood’s been “sluggish in terms of gentrification and economic development” ever since he moved in—that every ten years he’s declared that in a decade it’d turn around, and has bitten his words four times now. The café, he hopes, will change that.

“It’s been disappointing for me,” he says. “I call this my last ditch effort to jumpstart this neighborhood and see if that can really happen, like it did in the West End. I think it was pretty desolate there too. Now it’s full of beautiful little boutiques and cafés and bakeries and bistros and really cool stuff, you know?”

As we speak, I’m skeptical of Neal’s vision for revitalizing Smith Hill—frustrated even. Data from multiple studies show that gentrifi cation in the West End is actively displacing low-income residents. That somehow Rise ‘n Shine might be able to draw in new busi nesses and young professionals without pushing out the neighborhood’s low-income residents seems inconceivable. When I ask whether he worries about this possibility, he seems optimistic that he and several land-owning friends will be able to keep prices low for residents.

“What’s made it affordable is that there are several property owners here that have a hold on a lot of these buildings,” he says. “And we bought them early enough where we didn’t pay a whole lot of money. So we were able to keep the rent down. The philosophy is still affordable housing.”

“So that’s important to you?” I ask. We’ve been warm enough with each other that I feel comfortable digging deeper without insulting Neal.

“Yeah,” he affirms. “...I might call it a sophisticated boutique café, but it doesn’t mean that I’m doing this so that I can get $2,000 from the apartment. If anything, I just want this to be an attraction, to bring in another generation of buyers and tenants that can help support more commerce. We want other things to come in so that we have a really thriving neighborhood.”

Maybe I was missing the point of Neal’s vision; as we speak, he details plans for political events, workshops, and live music. Maybe there was a future in Smith Hill where the current residents could enjoy the added retail community, without being forced out. To help sort all this out, I enlisted the help of David Raileanu, Director of Red Ink Community Library—a different kind of third space. When I speak with him over the phone, he offers a surprising rebuttal to my initial concerns.

“Gentrification is not based on the price of a latte,” he tells me. “In my opinion, gentrification is more of a political process, one that starts at city council or in the state legislature, and is a very intentional decision that a political body makes in order to decide what kinds of people they want living in their communities.” He doubts that a small business could wield the

kind of political power required to jumpstart this process.

To him, Neal’s coffee shop seems more like community investment—not gentrification. I ask him where he draws the line between the two.

“It has a lot more to do with where the value is coming from and where the value is going,” he says. He cites Red Ink, which was founded by local residents in a previously unoccupied storefront, as an example of investment.

I invoke Fox Point and the displacement of its once-thriving immigrant community; the neighborhood remains dominated by local businesses—not big chains—but it would be nearly impossible to argue that gentrification didn’t happen there. David concedes that it’s complicated. His point, he says, is more so that behind every gentrification process is political intent: “I think when a local, small business owner sees a potential opportunity to start a business in their community, that doesn’t happen accidentally.”

Fox Point, for instance, was specifically targeted by government-led development campaigns; its change was not just the product of the decisions of independent small-business owners, but of a systematic attempt to decompose the existing neighborhood.

Back at The Shop, toward the end of my conversation with JP, we turn to the neighborhood around us. The Shop is at the center of Fox Point, only a couple blocks from Coffee Exchange. He’s wrestled with what it means to hold economic power in this neighborhood that has undergone sweeping change. “The idea of communities getting to participate in their own revitalization and not just the wealthiest land-owning portion of those communities getting to make decisions about things is super appealing,” he says. But you just don’t see that happening—at least not in Providence. He adds, “I don’t know how to get there.”

Chloe echoes the point: “When I think about gentrification, the bigger issues are the cost of housing, that we need rent control— stuff like that, that isn’t necessarily something that we can do [something] about. But we can be vocal about it.”

Despite these systemic challenges, both JP and Chloe insist on their responsibility to wield whatever economic or social power they do have to benefit the existing community.

Outside of keeping their prices lower than what they could have, given their proximity to Brown and RISD, JP tells me candidly, “this business has not done a good job.” He cites homogenous hires and value-adding renovations. “I think there’s definitely a lot of opportunity to—not performatively, but actually—connect with the people who have lived here, or who do live here.”

A week after we meet at White Electric, Chloe emails me a list of community engagement projects they’ve undertaken: locally-sourced pastries and dairy, holiday toy drives for neighborhood families, coffee and pastry do -

nations to local organizations and the community fridge, a bilingual Rent Relief clinic hosted in the shop—to name a few.

“Change is always happening,” David tells me. “The speed of it is controlled by the people who have the power to do so. So I don’t think it would be right for a small business owner or a landlord or a developer to throw up their hands and say, ‘there’s nothing that we can do about it’...They have the opportunity to choose—do we hire people from the community or do we hire people who work three towns away? Do we have hours that are conducive to the working class of our community, or do we specifically cater to people who don’t work? Those decisions are the kinds of decisions that either speed up or slow down gentrification.” What role a café assumes in its community, it seems, balances in weighted choices that require deep intentionality and care.

+++

On walks between interviews and moments between paragraphs, I’ve found myself quietly retracing my steps to look at what made all of this—the coffee and closeness and communal tables—feel so promising when I first spoke to JP, weeks ago now. At times it seemed absurd to bestow these shops with so much gravity, but even now their function does feel sacred and scarce. Bereft of cared-for public gathering spaces, the landscape of “third spaces” in the U.S. is dominated by these fraught private enterprises. Does that mean I should spite them? Resist them? Work to pin them down for what they are?

In truth, coffee shops are probably all of these things: profit-driven businesses and warm third spaces, exploited workplaces and trailblazing unions, gentrifying forces and community investments. That these meanings exist in tandem doesn’t exclude the possibility of belonging in coffee shops. These are imperfect models of community: spaces that seem to collectively reach out toward a more mutualistic future, but find themselves again and again beholden to the ordinary barriers against change. In so doing, they gesture toward what would be, or what might be, under different systemic circumstances.

That virtually every person I spoke to found something meaningful to parse out in the words “coffee shop” and “community” holds weight in and of itself. What that meaning sounded like varied—between owner, worker, patron—but it was there, lying beneath all of their words. When I try to place my finger on exactly what it is, I come up with something like ritual belonging—with tight strings and veiled boundaries attached.

CAMERON LEO B’25 has gotten more comfortable doing interviews since that fateful wet day.

Skye Jackson B’25, Cynthia Wang B’25, and Simon Ehlinger B’23 College Hill 16mm film

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Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Friday 3/3 @12PM: Global Climate Strike

Sunrise Brown will lead a demonstration to demand that Brown University dissociate from the fossil fuel industry and reinvest in the city of Providence, part of a worldwide climate action taking place today. Sunrise Brown recently launched the DIRE (Dissociation from fossil fuels, Reinvestment in Rhode Island) campaign to mobilize for immediate change within Brown, alongside a report documenting the university’s ties to fossil fuels.

Location: Main Green, 75 Waterman St, Providence, RI 02906

Friday 3/3 @11AM-12PM: RIHAP (Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project) Meeting

Join RIHAP’s meeting to discuss actions and mobilizations to aid in the effort to assist unhoused people in Rhode Island. Members from HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) will be attending as well. Email gabriela_paz-soldan@brown.edu if you’re interested in attending.

Location: 340 Lockwood St, Providence, RI 02907

Every Saturday until May @12PM: National #FiveFreedmen Book Club Reparations Educational Series

The SoliDarity Community Engagement Group, an organization that supports efforts to educate, empower, and uplift the community to reparations, is hosting weekly Zoom calls for people to learn about reparations and how descendants of chattel slavery can become a protected class as ‘American Freedmen.’ Sign up for the free online series here: https:// tinyurl.com/Reparations-Educational-Series

Location: Virtual, over Zoom

Thursday 3/9 @12-1PM: Rally For Affirmative Action

This spring, the Supreme Court is expected to rule against affirmative action in college admissions. Brown and other universities have used race-conscious admissions policies for decades to build diverse student bodies and support the admission of underrepresented students. This ruling will be a major blow to equitable admissions. Show that you care about race-conscious admissions by attending this rally!

Location: Main Green, 75 Waterman St, Providence, RI 02906

Thursday 3/9 @5PM: On the Politics of Love with Alexander Gourevitch

The Brown/RISD Young Democratic Socialists of America, a student organization fighting for workers’ and students’ rights on campus and advocating for revolutionary change, is hosting a talk by Brown University Associate Professor of Political Science Alexander Gourevitch on the socialist politics of love. Event details can be found at tinyurl.com/ loveydsa.

Location: MacMillan Hall 115, 167 Thayer St, Providence, RI 02906

Arts

Every Other Monday Starting March 13th @6-7PM: Black Holocaust

Writing Circle: Reparations for Black Americans

The Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council is a non-profit organization that is Black-, Brown-, Women-, and Queer-led and aimed at promoting solidarity for racial healing and reparative justice. The organization is hosting biweekly virtual writing meetings to garner public support through media and fundraising for Black Americans that are

descendants of chattel slavery. Register for a workshop here: https:// tinyurl.com/Black-HolocaustWriting-Circle.

Location: Virtual, over Zoom

Sunday 3/5 @4PM: Poor Paul — Rhode Island Red Carpet Premiere

Come watch the premiere of Poor Paul, a movie shot entirely in Rhode Island about a socially awkward college student who takes his roommates Clyde and Jason on a trip around the world after inheriting 500,000 frequent flyer miles. On their journey, they find themselves hostages of a delusional Italian man, hell-bent on his daughter marrying an American. Support local artists and buy a general admission ticket for $14 here: https://tinyurl.com/poor-paul-movie-premiere.

Location: CW Theaters - Lincoln Mall, 622 George Washington Hwy Lincoln, RI 02865

Saturday 3/18 @12-6PM: Native Traditional Storytelling

Join this event where five Indigenous storytellers, Waya’aisiwa Gary Keene, Roger Fernandes, Sunny Dooley, Jonathan James Perry, and Fern Naomi Renville will present their stories. Time will be allocated between each storyteller to allow the audience to write short responses. Attendees are also encouraged to participate in the cycle of reciprocity of these stories and are invited to bring any gifts, physical or otherwise, to exchange with storytellers for their gifts of knowledge.

Location: Old Library College Building, 15 Westminster St, Providence, RI 02903

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

+ Help Mother and Local Tenants’ Rights Organizer with Housing

Donate directly through CashApp to $SucelyMurrillo

Sucely, a mother and local tenants’ rights organizer, is currently looking for an apartment and is seeking assistance to help pay for the first month’s rent. Sucely has four kids and needs financial assistance for a hotel, medicine, and a couple of other needs. Anything you can donate will be greatly appreciated by Sucely and her family.

+ George Wiley Center

Donate at https://tinyurl.com/George-Wiley-Center-donations

The George Wiley Center coordinates mutual aid food and clothing distributions on an ongoing basis, based on donations and volunteer efforts primarily for people facing eviction. Volunteers, interns, or students with work-study are welcome to help organize access to food, housing, and utilities for all. Contact them to assist with fighting food insecurity, challenging utility shut-offs, and stopping evictions. Walk-in sessions are held every Wednesday from 6:30-7:30 pm at the George Wiley Center 32 East Ave, Pawtucket, RI 02860, or email at: organize@georgewileycenter.org

+ Amenity Aid Rhode Island

Donate at amenityaid.org/donate-money

Amenity Aid works to provide hygiene resources to marginalized communities and low-income people in need. On top of serving individuals, Amenity Aid partners with local shelters, food pantries, anti-domestic violence organizations, and other community groups that support underserved communities to distribute hygiene resources.

+ Project LETS Providence COVID-19 Relief Fund

Donate at projectlets.org/covid19

Project Let’s Erase The Stigma (LETS) is working in coalition with various grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to support marginalized groups in our community in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. All donations will directly help individuals, children, and families meet their basic needs.

+ Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund

Donate at tinyurl.com/oceanstateass

Support sex workers statewide. Priority is given to BIPOC sex workers, trans sex workers, and sex workers who have been impacted by the pandemic. There have been several workers who are presently unhoused, and any aid will help them find shelter. Ocean State A$$ is also currently unable to accept many requests for aid due to underfunding, so support will allow for both their ongoing support and waitlisted workers to reach their funding goals.

+ Queer & Trans Mutual Aid Providence

Venmo: @qtmapvd | Paypal: qtma.pvd@gmail.com | Info: tinyurl. com/qtma-pvd

QTMA PVD is a small, volunteer-run mutual aid fund for queer and trans folks in the Providence area. They do payouts once per week and have distributed over $80,000 since their founding in June 2020. They currently have over 30 outstanding requests for aid and would appreciate any donations!

Email