The College Hill Independent — Vol 48 Issue 7

01HIDE AND SEEK

03THIS WEEK IN MODERATION

& u/Yoni_Weil

04BARGAINING AT BROWN

08 THE SILENT SONG

09NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT

STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS

10COLLEGE HILL CLOUTONOMICS

& u/Sam_Stewart

12FROBENIUS MONOIDS

14TELL ME THE BIRDS

16THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

18AFFECT THEORY PRIMER

19DEAR INDY

20BULLETIN

& u/RL_Wheeler

FROM THE EDITORS

Masthead

MANAGING EDITORS

Angela Lian

Arman Deendar

Kolya Shields

WEEK IN REVIEW

Cecilia Barron

Yoni Weil

ARTS

George Nickoll

Linnea Hult

EPHEMERA

Colin Orihuela

Quinn Erickson

FEATURES

Luca Suarez

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Plum Luard

LITERARY

Jane Wang

Madeline Canfield

METRO

Ashton Higgins

Keelin Gaughan

Sofia Barnett

SCIENCE + TECH

Christina Peng

Daniel Zheng

Jolie Barnard

WORLD

James Langan

Tanvi Anand

X

Claire Chasse

Joshua Koolik

Lola Simon

DEAR INDY

Solveig Asplund

SCHEMA

Lucas Galarza

Sam Stewart

BULLETIN BOARD

Emilie Guan

RL Wheeler

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Yunan (Olivia) He

*Our Beloved Staff

DESIGN EDITORS

Andrew Liu

Ollantay Avila

Ash Ma

COVER COORDINATORS

Julia Cheng

Sylvie Bartusek

STAFF WRITERS

Abani Neferkara

Aboud Ashhab

Angela Qian

Caleb Stutman-Shaw

Charlie Medeiros

Charlinda Banks

Corinne Leong

Coby Mulliken

David Felipe

Emily Mansfield

Emily Vesper

Gabrielle Yuan

Jenny Hu

Kalie Minor

Kayla Morrison

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Maya Avelino

Martina Herman

Nadia Mazonson

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Naomi Nesmith

Nora Mathews

Riley Gramley

Riyana Srihari

Saraphina Forman

Yunan (Olivia) He

COPY EDITORS /

FACT-CHECKERS

Anji Friedbauer

Audrey He

Avery Liu

Ayla Tosun

Becca Martin-Welp

Ilan Brusso

Lila Rosen

Naile Ozpolat

Samantha Ho

Yuna Shprecher

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Eurie Seo

Jolie Barnard

Nat Mitchell

Yuna Shprecher

FINANCIAL COORDINATOR

Simon Yang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Izzy Roth-Dishy

Julia Cheng DESIGNERS

Anahis Luna

Eiffel Sunga

Jolin Chen

Kay Kim

Minah Kim

Nada (Neat) Rodanant

Nor Wu

Rachel Shin

Riley Cruzcosa

Ritvik Bhadury

Sejal Gupta

Simon Yang

Tanya Qu

Yuexiao Yang

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Lucy Pham

ILLUSTRATORS

Abby Berwick

Aidan Choi

Alena Zhang

Angela Xu

Anna Fischler

Avery Li

Catie Witherwax

Cindy Liu

Ellie Lin

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee

Luca Suarez

Luna Tobar

Meri Sanders

Mingjia Li

Muzi Xu

Nan/Jack Dickerson

Jessica Ruan

Julianne Ho

Ren Long

Ru Kachko

Sofia Schreiber

Sylvie Bartusek

COPY CHIEF

Ben Flaumenhaft

WEB DESIGNERS

Eleanor Park

Lucy Pham

Mai-Anh Nguyen

Na Nguyen

SENIOR EDITORS

Angela Qian

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

Isaac McKenna

Jane Wang

Lily Seltz

Lucia Kan-Sperling

MISSION STATEMENT

The College Hill Independent 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.

-AKA

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 self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

The Week in

( TEXT CECILIA BARRON & YONI WEIL DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION ASH MA )

c This past week, your intrepid section editors Yokee Weeple and Crudelia Brooldan sat on a panel hosted by Brown’s Institute for Seasonal Studies as part of their springtime conference. Below is an excerpt from the panel “Cosmologies in Hibernation.” The panel was moderated by the esteemed Seasonal Studies scholar Henton Conolor.

[Minute 163]

Moderator Conolor: …and on the question of Spring?

Brooldan: [drags on cigarette] Oh, Henton. Ha ha.

Weeple: Henton, I’m actually going to side with Ms. Brooldan on this point. What is this “Spring” you speak of? The whole notion is troubled from the very start. From the very start! Have you not been paying attention to anything we’ve been saying? I will insist once more that we speak, please, instead of the Death of Winter. I will point you to my book that I published with the University of Chicago Press earlier this year—

Brooldan: And just for a second I thought Weeple and I would agree on something, and then he goes on again about this so-called “Death” “of” “Winter.” I borrow here from the Easter Bunny, the lapin de Pâques as Derrida would say, in French, when I speak of Spring-as-birth-of-so-called-summer.

Weeple: Wrong!! [coughs]

Brooldan: Ahhh Weeple that’s precisely the point! Of course to say that spring is the birth of summer is wrong, faux as Foucault would say in French. To imply that spring can produce, reproduce in any sense would be to imprison spring in its own becoming. But that is precisely what I would like to do!

Weeple: [flustered, attempts to light cigar; fails] Mr. Conolor? Can you please ask Ms Brooldan to adhere in the course of her verbal jousting to the common tongue of the land? English! Ms. Brooldan, English, please!!

Weeple: What positive use can it have if it is defined by its death? Have you even picked up my new book? It is not a matter of use qua use, but rather a matter of the very usefulness of the categories of life and death themselves! For how can we have life if we do not have the death of winter? What remains if winter endures, encroaching with his icy tendrils into the fairer months of our limited calendar? How can there be life at all if there is no death of winter!

Brooldan: One could ask the same of Seasonal Studies, my esteemed colleague. How will there ever be a development in our discipline, liberation from the Comparative Literature department, without the death of yourself…

Weeple: Excuse me?

Conolor: Ms. Brooldan, have you just suggested that Mr. Weeple should die?

[Audience cheers.]

Brooldan: Well I guess I have, haven’t I? [Smiles smugly, ashes cigarette on mic.]

Weeple: [trying to be clever, trying to win back the audience] Well if I were to die, then that would make me Mr. Winter himself, eh, Ms. Brooldan, if you are suggesting that some new life could come from my death? Do you see how that works? Do you see how you’ve just made a fool of yourself?

Brooldan: [stands with passion] I am calling for the death of you, yes Mr. Weeple, the death of your school of thought.

resolved in the time allotted to us today! And I fear someone is going to be killed if I let this go on for too long. It is now time to move on to some questions from the audience. Do we have any questions from the audience?

[A tall man in a dark suit and sunglasses stands up, holding a microphone]

Unnamed man: [In a deep, menacing voice] Any springtime recipes to have on our radar this season?

Weeple: I’ve been a big fan of white asparagus and pasta dishes, honestly of all kinds. I made one the other day with rigatoni and capers with shaved white asparagus. I grated some manchego on there, and maaaan it was actually really good, I also did one with—

[Crowd, which had been grumbling since Weeple began his answer, overpowers Weeple with loud boos and throwing rocks at him. Weeple ducks for cover.]

Brooldan: Mustard on Rye.

[Crowd explodes into applause.]

Brooldan: You layer some pastrami onto that.

[Standing ovation.]

Brooldan: SAUERKRAUT.

[Crowd storms the stage.]

The panel went on for another three hours. Conolor passed away early in the scuffle, and Weeple finally, under great physical duress, conceded that Brooldan was his “uncle, uncle!”

B’24 and YONI WEIL B’ 24 are waiting in line at the new mustard shop on

Bargaining at Brown

( TEXT EMILY VESPER DESIGN ASH MA )

c On February 7, 2024, a group of students marched across the Main Green, entered University Hall, and delivered a letter to the Office of President Christina Paxson. Watching from the steps of the Campus Center, over a hundred of their peers sang the old union anthem, “Solidarity Forever.” The letter, written and delivered by undergraduate employees of the Brown Center for Students of Color (BCSC), requested Brown’s voluntary recognition of the union they intended, with supermajority support, to form. Brown obliged, and by the end of the month, the students would be members of a recognized bargaining unit—the Third World Labor Organization (TWLO).

TWLO is the latest organization to form amid a wave of union activity on Brown’s campus. Since spring 2023, postdoctoral researchers and three groups of student workers employed by the University have unionized. With the exception of postdocs, the recently unionized workers are all undergraduates—computer science teaching assistants, community coordinators, and BCSC employees. It’s an unprecedented development, given that merely two undergraduate labor unions existed across the entire United States prior to 2020.

Union membership nationally has slowly and steadily declined for decades, reaching a historic low of 10.1% in 2023. However, with a recent explosion in labor organizing, some workers say the tide is turning. Data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law—shows that the number of union representation petitions submitted to the Board increased by 53 percent from fiscal year 2021 to 2022. Over the past three years, thousands of workers at major employers such as Amazon and Starbucks held unionization campaigns that were not only successful but extremely visible, bringing organized labor back into the spotlight. Public support for unions is at 71 percent—its highest since 1965

Colleges and universities have become central battlegrounds in this revitalized labor movement. Thirty new student-worker bargaining units were formed in 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to a study by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

The College Hill Independent spoke to workers representing Brown’s four student unions and postdoc union, as well as several campus tour guides,

who are non-union workers but who recently organized collective action. These workers have different supervisors and different responsibilities; they deal with varying aspects of the University, from research to residential life. Yet commonalities emerge in their experiences and demands. Organized workers want better pay. They want formalized procedures to report workplace harassment and discrimination. They want explicit boundaries defining their job responsibilities and workload. They want a say in where the revenue they generate for the University goes.

Graduate Labor Organization

Graduate students have long occupied a contested position in American labor law. They originally won the right to form collective bargaining units in 2000, but the NLRB reversed that decision in 2004. This reversal—the outcome of a case filed by Brown—was then overturned in 2016, setting the stage for the University’s graduate students to form the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) two years later.

At the heart of this back-and-forth is a debate over whether graduate students should primarily be seen as students or workers. Brown now acknowledges graduate students as employees, but held off on doing so until it was legally mandated by the 2016 NLRB ruling. In July 2016, a month before the verdict, former Provost Richard Locke told the campus community that while Brown would respect the board’s decision, “graduate students are students, and not employees.”

Graduate students, who are paid a stipend by the University, typically conduct research and teach in addition to taking classes. Brown recognizes teaching, but not research, as labor; as a result, Brown’s approximately 2,000 graduate students cycle in and out of the bargaining unit depending on whether or not they are currently teaching. Workers not actively in the bargaining unit are still union members and, per GLO’s recent contract, enjoy equal protection and benefits. But research, organizers insist, is labor, too.

“Our labor is so undervalued,” said GLO President Sherena Razek.

“We have to fight to be seen as employees, and that is on purpose,” added Union Steward Devon Epiphany Clifton.

Brown University graduate students voted in favor of unionization in 2018. GLO—known at the

time as Stand Up for Graduate Student Employees— joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a national union. In 2020, union members signed the first graduate worker contract in the Ivy League.

This past December, the union ratified its second contract, described by multiple members as one of the strongest graduate worker contracts in the country.

“[The contract is] not perfect, it never is, but we were really happy with the result,” said Union Communications Director Andrew Clark. “But it was a ten-month process, and for nine and a half of those months, we were told no.”

“It is about compromise, but it is also about persistence,” he added.

The new contract guarantees graduate workers a yearly raise; by 2026, these raises will amount to a nearly $10,000 increase in their base stipend. Other contract highlights include expanded healthcare coverage, increased childcare subsidies, codified protections from COVID-19, expanded protections for non-citizen graduate workers, and expanded protections against discrimination and harassment.

The contract is a significant achievement, but enforcement has been a challenge, organizers told the Indy. Brown applied the recent raise to graduate workers’ paychecks at the end of March—three months after their contract was ratified. The University still owes workers thousands of dollars in back pay, which they promised to deliver by the end of April. “That is absolutely unacceptable,” said Razek. “Nowhere in the industry is it acceptable to take literal months to implement a raise.”

This is not the only situation wherein Brown owes graduate workers money. “Brown, in violation of our contract, changed our healthcare provider, doubling the cost of our copays and prescription drug prices,” Clark said. A system exists to reimburse the difference, but he describes it as “Byzantine.”

“It takes a long time and people fall through the cracks,” Clark said. “We should not have to jump through a bunch of hoops just to get our employer to honor our legally binding contract that we both agreed to.”

Along with contract enforcement, GLO is currently advocating for two graduate students who have raised grievances against the University. In one case, GLO is petitioning for the reinstatement of Meg Wilson, a graduate worker they allege was unfairly terminated due to her disability status. In the other, GLO characterizes Brown’s response to the alleged workplace sexual assault of a graduate student as an “egregious failure to support” the student. The Union is petitioning for the University to support her and “all survivors of sexual assault” in the Brown community, with the specific demand of extending this graduate student’s paid leave.

“Without a union, this grad would stand only with her community, her friends, her colleagues in the department. I’m very glad that we have the union, and all grads can stand with her. There is a united force,” said Bargaining Committee Co-Chair Victoria Antonetti.

GLO’s most visible initiative is arguably their campaign for divestment, which demands the University divest from companies facilitating Israel’s genocidal occupation of Palestine and drop the charges against the 41 students arrested in the Brown Divest Coalition’s December 11 sit-in.

The campaign launched on February 5th, but GLO’s history of advocating for Palestinian liberation started long before this year. In 2021, the Union formed the Palestine Solidarity Caucus “in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.” In a referendum that same year, 87% of union members voted in favor of divestment.

“This is not some minority issue. The majority of

Courtsey of Jiahua Chen

people working and studying here want the university to divest,” Clark said, citing a recent Brown Daily Herald poll which concluded that 67% of undergraduates surveyed were in favor of divestment.

Clark noted that the relationship between organized labor and Palestinian liberation is not always obvious. “I think sometimes people from the outside might think that these are unrelated struggles or unrelated demands. Why are people in Rhode Island demonstrating for Palestine? [How] does the investment portfolio of some Ivy League school affect what is going on in Gaza?” he said. “But it is a direct relationship. Our employer is investing a portion of their endowment in companies that provide weapons and construction equipment that facilitates the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Palestinians.”

It is a position echoed by many of the workers who spoke with the Indy: their labor makes money for the University, so they deserve a say in where the money goes.

“When we’re talking about union organizers, union members on Brown University’s campus advocating that Brown divest from companies that aid and abet and profit from the genocide in Palestine, that demand didn’t come out of nowhere. People in Palestine asked us to do that. The labor unions in Palestine, the professors, academic workers in Palestine, have specifically asked higher education workers in the United States to do that,” Clark continued.

“The Brown University endowment is almost entirely invested through external specialist investment managers, all with the highest level of ethics. This includes the rejection of violence,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark told the Indy. “The endowment is not directly invested in defense stocks or large munitions manufacturers,” he added.

The University has frequently emphasized the absence of “direct” investment in its response to pro-divestment organizing.

“The whole distinction between directly versus indirectly invested,” said Clifton, “I’m a PhD candidate in English. That’s just a word game. If I give my money to a guy to invest, and he invests it in a company that makes wheels for tanks used in a genocide… I’m investing in a genocide directly!”

On March 11, Provost Francis J. Doyle III alerted community members of a change to Brown’s freedom of expression policies in a Today@Brown announcement. The update states, “Brown supports the right of employees to strike, picket and protest regarding work-related issues, but there are limitations and qualifications on the exercise of that right. The right to engage in these activities depends on the object or purpose of the action, its timing, and/or the conduct of those involved.” It then clarifies that members of a labor union “can be held accountable for failing to follow University policies—just like every other member of our community.”

The announcement noted that the update was issued “particularly given recent visibility about planned activism by some union leaders on campus this spring.”

Clifton recalled her reaction to the message: “I was just like, ‘They are coming for Sherena, the Palestinian President of GLO. They are coming for me.’”

“It was pretty clear to all of us that this was a bridge too far,” she added.

In an Instagram post, GLO characterized the announcement as a “retaliatory threat.” Shortly afterward, they filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the NLRB. Individuals, unions, and employers can file ULP charges to seek recourse for alleged violations of federal labor law. Once a ULP charge is filed, the NLRB investigates the allegations; if they find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, they can enforce “remedies” such as the reinstatement of a unlawfully terminated worker.

Notably, this took place roughly two weeks after former tour coordinator Janek Schaller filed a ULP charge against the University, arguing that his demotion from the tour coordinator position was unlawful. Schaller was demoted after commenting on planned student demonstrations in a staff Slack channel.

“It feels almost silly to be like, Brown has done a legal labor violation. This is a moral, ethical violation of basic principles of humanity,” said Razek.

“It’s an attack on the very things the University has hired me here to teach as a Black feminist theorist

and scholar,” said Clifton.

“To expect us not to protest the University would make hypocrites of us and our students, a mockery of everything we stand for and everything they hire us to teach here,” Razek added.

On April 4, the University issued further updates to policies regarding use of the Main Green, postings, and protests and demonstrations.

In a message to the Indy, Razek wrote, “This was another blatant attempt of repression of student and student worker activism on Palestine, and another demonstration that free speech is under attack on our campuses. The threat of punishment for protected political speech will be added to our active ULP case.”

“Also, unilaterally imposing new policy on collective bargaining units without consulting the unions is a violation of federal labor law. We will pursue all recourse possible,” she continued.

Despite the University’s increasing hostility towards pro-divestment organizing, Razek and other organizers remain hopeful.

“Me alone, I would not be able to do what we have done for divestment. It is because divestment and Palestine matter to so many grad workers. That is how we have been able to accomplish what we are able to accomplish,” said Razek.

“And that’s why we believe that we will win divestment,” she continued. “It’s just a matter of time. And I say that with the same force that I say Palestine will be free. We have to believe it and bring it into existence, even when people are telling you it is impossible. Palestinians do impossible things every day.”

Teaching Assistant Labor Organization

On March 2, 2023, Brown’s computer science teaching assistants went to the polls to vote on unionization. Three months prior, the University had declined to voluntarily recognize the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization (TALO), despite the fact that over 70% of computer science TAs had signed union authorization cards. Organizers were forced to file a petition with the NLRB to hold a union election.

However, according to organizer Swetabh Changkakoti, the refusal to voluntarily recognize TALO only strengthened union support, offering organizers time to reach more TAs. With 91.5% of votes in favor of forming a union, the election was a landslide victory for TALO. TALO—described by TWLO member Garrett Brand as “the blueprint” for undergraduate labor organizing—became Brown’s first undergraduate union.

TALO’s success was the culmination of more than a year of organizing, which began when a group of computer science TAs circulated a survey intended to formally assess the working experiences of their coworkers. The survey recorded widespread incidence of problems TAs had long informally acknowledged: low pay; pressure to not log overtime; insufficient support from professors; lack of boundaries around workload; office hours stretching until three am, well beyond their intended conclusion; last-minute development of course materials, sometimes occurring the night before an assignment would be released to students.

“I think the students don’t realize how much the TAs actually do,” said Yasmine Abdelaziz, TALO’s President. “It’s very easy to get tired and burnt out.”

These problems reflected “a culture of overwork,” Changkakoti says. In spring 2022, organizers published an open letter—signed by 44 TAs—which presented five demands to the Computer Science Department and University administration, among them increased compensation, more clearly defined job responsibilities, and support for TAs who needed to work beyond the expected 10 weekly hours.

That semester, a group of computer science faculty and TAs met to discuss potential solutions to the problems organizers identified. These meetings led to a pay raise of approximately 20% for all computer science TA positions. It was “a good pay raise,” Changkakoti said, but the University made “no other structural changes.” Discussions for further improvements have since stagnated.

“We realized the only way to make sustainable change is to unionize, and to have institutional memory in the form of a union; to have real power to bargain with the administration, and to have actual contracts instead of missives which were very often not followed,” said Changkakoti.

Members of multiple unions told the Indy that Brown—in verbal and written communications to workers who expressed the intent to unionize—characterized the union as a “third party” that would interfere with the University’s ability to advance workers’ interests, slowing the University down with “red tape” and complicated bureaucratic procedures. TALO’s origins challenge this rhetoric, described by Devon Clifton as one of Brown’s many “soft union-busting tactics.” Unionization was not the first strategy organizers attempted. But, with just a pay raise to show for a semester of dialogue, it became clear the current practice of informal meetings was unsustainable. TAs needed a union.

Bargaining began in April 2023. Organizers had hoped to negotiate a multi-year contract, but soon realized that the process would take longer than anticipated. They pivoted to negotiating an interim contract which would hold for the 2023–24 academic year. “We could have bargained for more; we could have spent time making a fleshed-out contract, which is something we are doing right now,” Changkakoti told the Indy. “At that point, we just wanted to make sure we got the essentials in before another semester began.” TALO reached an agreement with the University in August, with 99% of union members voting to ratify the interim contract.

Through bargaining, the union won a pay raise for all computer science TAs. Base pay is now $20 per hour, up from $15.50. Meta Teaching Assistants, who coordinate the teaching assistant program, earn the highest wage of all TALO members at $27.50 per hour. Across all roles, wages rose by 20-30%, and are nearly 60% higher than when TAs first began organizing in Spring 2022.

The new contract clarifies many ambiguities around TA responsibilities and workload. It establishes defined limits for course development and mechanisms to prevent overwork. It also expands and codifies support for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

But TALO has a lot of work ahead of them. Contract enforcement has been hard, according to Changkakoti. Overwork and last minute course development still happen, although internal surveys indicate rates are lower than previous semester, he told the Indy

“There’s a gap between knowing that the contract is being violated and actually taking the step to fight a grievance against that, or to approach the union for that. It seems like a formal and scary process. Our contract does a lot on its own, but it is only really powerful if TAs are also empowered to bring up violations of the contract,” Changkakoti said.

One significant issue is the lack of a DEI coordinator. The interim contract guarantees the department maintains full-time DEI staff, despite the DEI coordinator position’s recent vacancy. “Because of that, the Diversity and Inclusion Advocates, the Health and Wellness Advocates do not have much support right now,” Changkakoti said.

Despite enforcement problems, organizers agree the union has meaningfully improved their working conditions. “It’s like a safeguard,” said Abdelaziz. “I know that I am protected in my work, and I know I will not face retaliation for anything I do, so I am able to make decisions more comfortably. If something does go wrong, I know that there is something that protects me.”

Union members began bargaining for a longterm contract on Tuesday, April 2. They are hoping to make it easier to implement the protections in their interim contract. “We’re keeping a lot of the language around DEI, but we’re making it more enforceable,” said Abdelaziz. Other demands include pay raises commensurate with cost of living increases and the right to third-party arbitration.

Labor Organization of Community Coordinators

In an interview with the Indy, an anonymous Community Coordinator described their tumultuous first month of working at the University. After a whirlwind week of intensive training, the sophomore found themself dealing with a supervisor who was overly demanding and punitive. When they declined a request to meet on a Sunday evening, their supervisor’s behavior escalated into harassment. “I told him I couldn’t make it, and he got really mad,” the CC told the Indy. “He started calling my

phone and texting me. He eventually showed up at my door at 9 pm and started knocking and would not leave. He kept knocking for at least fifteen minutes. I had to call DPS to make a statement.”

The incident left this CC shaken. Of particular concern was the fact that the supervisor had access to a master key, granting him access to any dorm room on campus. This CC immediately purchased two portable door locks and slept in a friend’s room until they arrived.

The supervisor in question was an Area Coordinator, managing a subset of Brown’s 49 residence halls. The AC’s supervisors learned about the confrontation through the filed Department of Public Safety report and reached out to the anonymous CC to debrief. According to this CC, the ResLife director explicitly condemned the supervisor’s behavior as unacceptable; however, the supervisor retained his position for weeks after.

Brown’s Community Coordinators unionized in October of 2023, becoming the second undergraduate labor union on campus. “We got voluntary recognition, which is very rare. That, I think, was an effect of Brown trying to keep its progressive image. I think it’s also because they saw a massive win for TALO,” said the anonymous CC, who was an organizer in the formation of the union, called the Labor Organization of Community Coordinators (LOCC). Their supervisor’s pattern of harassment exemplifies many of the problems the CC hopes to resolve through bargaining.

The supervisor’s employment was ultimately terminated. To the CC, the fact that he was able to remain in the Area Coordinator position for almost three months after the incident is a testament to systemic issues within ResLife: “He is one individual, but he is a symptom of ResLife not having proper regulation. They do not have bounds on what Area Coordinators can do and what power they have.” The CC said their meeting with the AC’s supervisors was a missed opportunity for ResLife to check the AC’s behavior. “Because there’s no formal complaint process, even when the director acknowledges that there have been obvious violations of their own rules, they won’t do anything about it,” they said.

The creation of a formal grievance procedure is a priority for LOCC organizers, who began bargaining with the University in February. Since then, they have presented 13 articles to the University’s bargaining committee, organizer Anna Ryu said. Their proposals, developed based on the results of CC town halls and bargaining surveys, address a wide range of issues.

Increased compensation is another priority. The union aims to secure free room and board—which residential workers at many universities receive— for CCs, in addition to increasing their stipend. Crucially, organizers want to ensure this coverage is implemented in a way that does not disadvantage CCs on financial aid who may already have room and board covered.

Organizers also want to clarify and standardize CC responsibilities. ResLife “keep[s] the language vague around our responsibilities and roles,” said Ryu. This “enables disorganization on [ResLife’s] part,” she continued. CCs are often called in to staff ResLife events on short notice, even when the events have no direct connection the residential communities CCs support. “ResLife puts us to work at random jobs, things that aren’t even what CCs do. Some of the people who are doing ticketing for Spring Weekend are CCs,” the anonymous CC said.

CCs’ experiences vary drastically depending on their supervisor, Ryu added. “It almost seems like what’s in the [ResLife] contract doesn’t really matter, because it’s ultimately how your AC does things,” she said.

Other demands include guaranteed rehiring for CCs, protection from discrimination and retaliation, and even allocation of residents among CCs.

Ryu singled out even allocation of residents as an example of a “relatively small, specific situation” that can make a huge impact on CC experience. On Ryu’s team of CCs, who cover four different dormitories, some CCs oversee as few as 30 residents, while others are assigned to more than 60. Across campus, the range is even wider, she added.

“I hadn’t considered before that those are numbers that can be changed,” Ryu said. “But it is something that can be changed, it’s just a matter of, how loud are we going to speak out on it?”

So far, bargaining sessions have consisted exclusively of LOCC’s bargaining committee proposing

potential articles for their contract. The University is expected to begin making counter-proposals soon. Ryu is excited for future sessions, which she expects to be more of a “back-and-forth.”

“The goal is to have a contract in place for the next academic year,” she said.

Both Ryu and the anonymous CC told the Indy that their status as undergraduate workers has elicited some backlash and confusion from other students regarding the need for a union. Ryu said it is important to “recognize the nuances and distinctions” of their position—many CCs have had an overall positive working experience.

“The words ‘exploitation’ and ‘abuse’ can apply to situations that are so extreme and incomparable to the work that we’re doing. It’s easy to ridicule and belittle student organizing for that reason,” Ryu said. “But if you’re unionizing only when some gross violation of rights has happened, it’s already too late.”

Brown Postdoc Labor Organization

In the spring of 2023, Brown University postdoctoral researchers petitioned the administration to increase their salaries, inspired by a successful campaign recently conducted by Princeton postdocs. The petition garnered over 175 signatures— nearly half of Brown’s approximately 350 postdocs. Brown did not act on organizers’ demands.

“That was really, really frustrating,” said Caroline Keroack, a second-year postdoctoral fellow. “We realized we’re not going to get the administration to do anything if we don’t come together and formalize collective action.”

Hoping to capitalize on the momentum generated by the petition, organizers reached out to postdocs across campus to assess support for unionization. “Organizing postdocs is uniquely challenging,” said Keroack. “Unlike grad students, we don’t take classes together. For the first nine months I worked here, I only knew the two other postdocs on my floor.” Organizers sent cold emails and walked into postdocs’ offices unannounced to reach what Keroack deemed an “isolated population.”

But support for unionization was overwhelming, said Keroack. In the fall of 2023, organizers launched a campaign soliciting their peers to sign union authorization cards. They filed with the NLRB in late December; just over a month later, Brown voluntarily recognized their union, named the Brown Postdoc Labor Organization (BPLO).

A range of working conditions motivated postdocs’ unionization. Both Keroack and BPLO organizer Sarah Neville named salary as a primary concern. Postdocs’ salaries are tied to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) minimum, which starts at $56,484 per year for a first-year postdoctoral researcher. The NIH minimum does not account for cost of living differences between regions; furthermore, not all postdocs are funded by the NIH.

“When I started at Brown, my paycheck was less than what I was making as a PhD student [at Harvard],” Keroack told the Indy. “I now have this degree, and I’m making less money than I did when I was working towards this degree. Brown claims to want to be this incredible research facility and be the example of research, but then they won’t compensate their researchers in a way that they can live their lives.”

Additionally, Keroack and Neville cited unequal access to resources and a lack of standardized protections as a central problem they hope to resolve through collective bargaining. Both organizers describe their personal workplace experiences at Brown positively but emphasize that this is not the uniform case for all postdocs.

“One thing that we share in common is that we’re underpaid,” Neville said, “but some of my friends just have very different experiences, like never really getting to take PTO [paid time off] for a whole two or three years that they’ve been doing their postdoc… We don’t have a lot of protections that are regulating our overall experience. It’s very much luck of the draw how nice of a PI [Principal Investigator] you have.”

Keroack said postdocs’ access to benefits such as healthcare and childcare subsidies varies based on factors such as citizenship, type of program, and funding source. When Keroack won a fellowship, for example, she lost retirement benefits. “It’s one of those things where you’re encouraged to apply for fellowships if you want to pursue an academic career,

and it’s beneficial to the institution. And then you get punished for it,” she said.

Organizers are also seeking to increase support for non-citizen postdocs and postdocs with children, and strengthen protections against harassment and discrimination. They hope to begin bargaining sessions in May, though an exact date has not been set. In the meantime, they have been drafting a constitution and surveying postdocs to better understand what union members want out of a contract.

Third World Labor Organization

In November 2023, Gabriela Venegas and her coworkers at the Brown Center for Students of Color hosted a teach-in on Palestinian liberation. As Heritage Series Programmers, it was their job to plan events “surrounding topics of race, cultural celebration, social justice, and resistance.” But their initial proposal elicited resistance from University staff. “The director of the BCSC told me we couldn’t do it because the BCSC is prohibited from making political statements,” said Venegas.

Student workers “had to fight tooth and nail” to get the event approved, said Venegas. The event, “Showing Up for Palestine: Intercommunal Solidarity Building for Students of Color,” ran on November 17th after student workers heavily modified the proposal and event branding to meet University policy. “We had to do so many loopholes and change the language and water it down,” said Venegas.

“Seeing the way the director himself and even the adult staff were so scared of doing this event in the first place is what got me thinking: we need to figure out a way to protect ourselves and future students because we can’t just stay quiet,” said Venegas.

After the teach-in, Venegas said, BCSC student workers decided that unionization would be the best way to “protect [their] freedom of speech.” The following weeks were marked by a burst of organizing. Workers had countless conversations with coworkers, learning what their peers hoped to change and preserve about the Center. By the end of the fall semester, a supermajority of BCSC student workers had signed union authorization cards.

Organizers announced their intent to unionize at the February 7 “Labor For Palestine” rally during the week-long “Hunger Strike for Palestine.” Three weeks later, the Third World Labor Organization was voluntarily recognized by Brown.

The decision to unionize was “inherently political,” according to union member Garrett Brand. While workers hope to increase their compensation and better their immediate working conditions—“traditional union things,” as Brand put it—their number one priority is protecting the political speech of BCSC workers.

“The idea for a union came about very directly as advocacy for Palestine was taking off on campus,” said Brand. “There’s a long, intertwined legacy of student activism in the BCSC. Recently, that spirit of the BCSC… student workers have felt it’s been under threat.”

The BCSC’s origins can be traced to 1968, when a group of Black students walked out of Brown and Pembroke College in protest of the institutions’ pervasive racism. The protesters wanted systemic change; they successfully called upon the university to increase the number of Black students admitted. (At the time, Black students constituted only 2.3% of the student body).

Over the next decade, students would continue organizing around institutional racism. A pivotal moment came in 1975, when forty students occupied University Hall for 38 hours, urging the University to recommit to the 1968 demands. The BCSC—then called the Third World Center—was established as a result of this demonstration.

“The anti-colonial and anti-imperialist rhetoric which ran so deeply through the Global South, these revolutionary socialist movements, are really what inspired the name of the Third World Center and what the students stood for,” said Venegas.

BCSC workers unionized to “uphold the political legacy of the Third World Center,” according to a post on the TWLO Instagram.

The union began bargaining with the University on Friday, April 5th. Organizers are still finalizing their exact platform, but Venegas said “institutionaliz[ing] freedom of speech” remains a priority.

Union members also hope to improve working

conditions more broadly. Ashhab said student workers deal with a variety of problems that include understaffing, low wages, and a lack of contractual protections.

The Center’s non-student staff are busy and overworked, bargaining committee member Aboud Ashhab said, making it harder for them to support students. Non-student workers are not members of the union, but Ashhab hopes to bargain for the creation of more non-student staff roles.

Students are also underpaid. While some workers receive stipends, others, such as Heritage Series Programmers, earn Rhode Island minimum wage. Hourly workers are expected to work no more than 10 hours per week. Ashhab said some workers feel pressure to carry over additional hours to the next pay period or not log them at all.

“We have a lot of pressure on us, because of the perceived political censorship and the ambiguities in our contract. I still like my job at the BCSC, I love my community. But some of these conditions make it very tense and very stressful,” Ashhab said.

But with bargaining underway, organizers are excited for the future of the union. “Just the process of forming the union, in and of itself, has been valuable for people. It has promoted unity among staff and coworkers within the union, definitely a sense of solidarity,” said Brand.

Campus Tour Guides

Following a semester of increased student advocacy for Palestinian liberation, a number of campus tour guides found themselves grappling with what it meant to represent a university that refused to divest from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid— and, moreover, a university increasingly hostile to student activism.

Janek Schaller was one of them. The Brown senior worked as a tour coordinator, leading campus tours and managing a team of more than 70 guides. At the same time as his job required him to be a “student ambassador” for Brown, the university was actively pressing criminal trespassing charges against him and 40 other demonstrators who occupied University Hall in BDC’s December 2023 protest.

“I had sincere misgivings about representing an institution that arrested me, for obvious reasons,” Schaller told the Indy. “That being said, I definitely wanted to continue on as a coordinator… I felt at the outset, in terms of the way students were leveraging their position as students and also mobilizing together… I felt that it was important that there be somebody present in charge of the tour guide program to allow for that to be represented faithfully and accurately on campus. To really do our work as ambassadors for campus at a time when emotions and tensions and pressure are at their highest.”

Schaller did not get the chance to see this vision through. Less than two weeks into the spring semester, he was demoted from his role as tour coordinator as a result of a message he sent in a tour guide Slack channel.

Sent on February 2nd, the first day of the student hunger strike for divestment, the message informed guides of upcoming “tour disruptions,” which would involve “passing out flyers, silent demonstration along the tour route, and postering.”

“I have cooperated with other organizers to allow for tour disruptions to happen in a safe and controlled manner that does not target any members of the guiding community,” wrote Schaller. He expressed his intention to support both students who felt that their position was “more important than ever” and wanted to lead tours the week of the hunger strike, and students unwilling to give tours during active demonstrations.

Schaller sent the message in #fun-tour-guides, a Slack channel accessible only to student guides. The choice to exclude admissions officers and non-student staff was deliberate. “I was concerned the office would try to prevent the flyering from taking place. I was concerned the office would try to manufacture some communication to guides in light of these disruptions that I felt would not actually do much service to the guides themselves,” Schaller said.

According to Schaller, the Admissions Office had historically issued guidance on “acceptable speech” regarding “fraught topics” such as affirmative action and Title IX lawsuits. “In each of these instances, guides were routinely dissatisfied. They felt they were

being restricted from sharing their experience,” said Schaller. He characterized past recommendations as “remarkably stilted” and “PR speak.”

After administrators caught wind of the message, they removed Schaller from the roles of tour coordinator and active guide. The administrators—representatives from the Admissions Office, the Office of the Provost, and Human Resources—offered Schaller the option to remain employed in a limited capacity, exclusively permitted to work shifts at the Information Desk in Faunce House. Schaller said this “felt like an insult.” He promptly resigned.

Schaller said administrators claimed his message pressured students to either support the protests for divestment or not work. “You can draw your own conclusions, but it seemed to be a significant distortion of my message,” he said.

On February 26, Schaller filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board after consulting with GLO’s lawyer on retainer. “My message constituted protected activity under federal labor law, and any disciplinary action against me on the precedent of it being unacceptable was in fact unlawful,” Schaller said.

In an email to the Indy, Associate Provost for Enrollment and Dean of Undergraduate Admission Logan Powell wrote that he “can’t comment on individual, confidential employment matters.”

Upon learning of Schaller’s demotion, tour guides immediately began organizing, deciding upon three demands. First, they asked that Brown recognize Schaller’s Unfair Labor Practice charge and reinstate him as a tour coordinator. Second, they asked the university to enter negotiations with guides to codify free speech protections in their contract. Finally, they asked that President Christina Paxson bring the 2020 Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) report, which recommends that Brown divest from “companies identified as facilitating human rights violations in Palestine,” for discussion before the Brown Corporation.

On February 27, Schaller says, a majority of guides gave verbal confirmation to initiate a strike for these demands. Organizers postponed the strike to March 8, the day after a town hall meeting hosted by the Admissions Office. Schaller says this was done to appeal to guides who “felt that we hadn’t made an effort to engage the office in dialogue on these demands.” He notes that guide engagement in organizing waned significantly in the weeks between his demotion and the planned strike.

According to former guide Caroline Sassan, University administration declined to offer any comprehensive guidance on acceptable speech during the town hall. However, she added, when individual guides inquired as to whether specific comments were acceptable, Admissions Officers communicated their approval.

“That, to me, was very upsetting, because it was like, calling on people’s personal experiences and being like, ‘Oh, of course that was okay!’ when in reality, these are the types of things people were pulled aside for and had no reasonable expectation of whether or not they could expect to be disciplined for,” said Sassan.

After the meeting, organizers could not confirm support for a majority strike. Tour guides and community members nonetheless picketed on March 8th, following a PSC-sponsored rally for International Working Women’s day, in support of the demands.

Notably, the recent update to Brown’s freedom of expression policies, in response to which GLO filed a ULP charge, was announced three days after the picket, on March 11.

In lieu of the strike, nine guides, including Sassan, jointly resigned in a letter sent to Dean Logan Powell on March 18th.

The tour guides are not unionized, nor have they announced any intention to unionize. All workers, whether or not they have a union, have the right to go on strike, per a 1962 Supreme Court verdict.

“A formalized union wouldn’t have been able to strike for divestment,” Schaller told the Indy. “A political call like that is not within the prview of an established labor organization.”

However, organizing guides did discuss the prospect of unionization, an idea which had been circulating among guides for “at least a year,” according to Schaller. “Many of the guides who were on the fence indicated that they were hesitant to endorse a unionization push because they had doubts about

whether the work they were doing merited organized representation,” he added.

At one point, Sassan had felt that way—she initially “laughed at the idea” of unionization. But the past few semesters have changed her mind. “The repression that the University does behind the scenes, as many large institutions do, has been brought to the forefront,” she said.

“The push for a union, if and when that happens for the guides, is not because the working conditions for the guides are intolerable in regards to our pay or how long the tours are, anything like that… it’s because right now, representing the university has become intolerable,” Sassan continued.

While Schaller’s demotion was the catalyst for guides’ recent organizing, restriction and ambiguity around acceptable speech had long been an issue in the program. Shazain Khan, a former guide who took part in the coordinated resignation, spoke with the Indy about being disciplined for comments made on a tour.

After two years of working as a tour guide, Khan had a “deep repertoire of jokes” that had “always done very well” on tours. But in August, a visitor complained to the Admissions Office about specific comments made by Khan. Among them were quips about needing a therapist after taking organic chemistry and using UTRA funding to purchase a luxury handbag. These comments were clearly made in jest, Khan said; he took care to contextualize them, adding, for example, that while organic chemistry was hard, “amazing faculty made it worth it.” However, in an email reviewed by The Indy, Khan’s supervisor said his comments “harm[ed] the institution’s reputation” and were “off-putting to guests.”

Of additional concern was a more serious comment Khan had made in response to a visitor who asked him what his least favorite thing about Brown was. “The administration is deaf to the needs of the students at times, but the students are the ones who really make the Brown experience worth it,” Khan said. “Those feelings are a personal opinion,” his supervisor wrote, adding that “the tour, which is intended to attract prospective students to apply to Brown, is not the time nor place for disparaging comments about the University.” As a result of the complaint, Khan’s hours were cut to a single tour per week, he told the Indy

“Before all this disciplinary action, I felt grounded in the tours I was giving. I felt confident I could give them, I felt like I wasn’t lying, I was being honest. After all this stuff took place, it felt like I was like a robot saying things that were regurgitated,” Khan said.

Guides said this incident speaks to a larger pattern. The tour guide program “disproportionately excludes the experiences of guides who hold marginalized identities and guides of color in particular as ones that are most likely not to be uniformly positive and therefore not permissible within the scope of campus tours,” said Schaller.

While guides’ demands include Schaller’s reinstatement, Schaller emphasized that the story is far bigger than his individual experience. “We were very clearly trying to link the experience of laborers on this particular role on campus with the broader trend of suppression of student speech as it relates to divestment from Palestinian occupation,” he told the Indy.

Schaller said Brown’s treatment of student political speech is in conflict with the values of “open expression, academic freedom, bringing students together and engaging in dialogue”—values the University claims, in its mission and promotional material, to uphold. “[Brown is] refusing every opportunity given to them at actually embodying that commitment to free speech,” he said. He pointed to the guides’ third demand—for Paxson to bring the 2020 ACCRIP report in front of the Corporation—as an example.

“The demand is not to divest, even though that is clearly, in my opinion, the only responsible thing to be doing at this point in time,” said Schaller. “The demand is simply to listen.”

EMILY VESPER B’25 believes in the power of collective bargaining.

The Silent Song

c There’s a girl who I see every Sunday morning at Quaker silent worship. She bungles into the Meeting House a few minutes late each week with matted curls and gives a firm handshake. The floor creaks under her feet. She sits in the corner with her head in her hands and her eyes to the ceiling. Sometimes she clutches a book to her abdomen. It’s often The Great Gatsby. Naked women lodged in eyeballs and a tear running down a ghostly blue face are etched on the tattered copy’s cover.

There’s a strange array erupting from her bag. Some rifling mangled yellow legal pads. A jangling red carabiner. Tangled earbuds tapping against worn leather.

There’s a rhythm in the way she walks, the right foot falling heavier than the left. The way she moves to the mic when she breaks the silence to speak. And there is music in her speech. A pop when her lips open wide. A whistle as she exhales. Or how her tongue clicks against the roof of her mouth with each pause:

“

There’s a blue book in the library. I was rifling through the bins a week ago and found it. It’s called ‘Friends for 300 Years.’ And you know I didn’t actually open it. I just thought it was sweet. I thought it was sweet—friends for 300 years. And excited about the prospect of being friends with someone for 300 years. I thought about sitting in a sunny window with someone you love. That we could sit and stare and not topple from our window for 300 years. That we could never run out of things to talk about. There would be wind and rain and we would be unmoved. For 300 years. I didn’t open the book, but

“

But now of course that isn’t what the book is, really. It’s a history of Quakers. For 300 years. Could we really be friends for 300 years? We might run out of things to say. Our throats would be parched. We would have drained all the dreams. And exhausted all the stories. Right? And then? Quiet, maybe.

“ We love the sound of silence. And all its supposed contradictions. ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Is sound bounding waves or elicited by an ear? A human ear? Would it matter? Would it matter if we were never there to hear it? Or the resolution might be that we are never able to know, and yet we still fight and fill Reddit pages full. We’re haunted.

“ We love the sound of silence. So we have given it its own sound. ‘Shhhhh.’ Here, can you hear the quiet? ‘Shhhh,’ uttered by graying librarians, or spat by a Kindergarten teacher, drops of split landing on her stern finger. We have a special spell for quiet. A sacred ritual. And it has been drilled into our bones for years, 300 years, maybe.

“ Simon and Garfunkel, too, love the sound of silence. And they coo of meandering in it. A world where people talk and do not speak. The speaker calls out to the people who emerge in the dim light, but their words like silent raindrops fell, / And echoed in the wells of silence. Silent echoes exist too, I suppose. Paul wrote the song in his dark bathroom with the faucet running. He murmurs the lower harmonies while Garfunkel resounds with the melody. Simon falls slightly behind Garfunkel, as if, in a desperate attempt to recreate a speaker on a damp night, you had played the song twice from two different phones and had never managed to get it quite right. It’s easy to get lost in the sound. A tree falls somewhere and the earth shakes. Try, just try and feel it.

( TEXT PLUM LUARD DESIGN MINAH KIM ILLUSTRATION SOFIA SCHREIBER )

“ We love the sound of silence. And have for 300 years, as the book claims. We love that in silence, the divine light believed to be found in each body, blooms. Your body is glowing. All the light brought to the surface. Maybe you could even hear it, if you listened hard enough. The silence is done in the embrace of community. We hear the sound of silence together. “I used to fear the sound of silence. Withdrew at the thought of my dry swallow ricocheting, bouncing off the rafters like an unwanted pop song. Or an echoing sneeze on days my nose dripped from New York City cold. But we secretly like that silence isn’t true silence, in fact. The silence remains even if punctured with a cough. Or the buzz of electricity. Or silence is best, yes, if in the spring we can hear the birds. Or the tap of an anxious toe. Or maybe the rumble of a beating heart in a world where our bodies are barely our own.

“ When I was little we sang a song together at the close of each Quaker meeting. When we sit so silently a special silence comes to me. I like to feel my thoughts grow wide and touch my center deep inside. In that silence, I can hear a music with my inside ear. The sound of oceans, birds, and wind, and someone saying you’re my friend. In that silence, I can share my thoughts with friends who really care and sometimes I can even see the kind of friend I’d like to be. Teenage us laughed at the ‘touch my center deep inside’ line. I remember the chorus of squeaking small voices. And trying to picture an inside ear. I thought of a conch shell which rang off the ocean, eagerly brandished. Silence, I was sure, had its own sound and it sounded like rumbling waves and raucous wind.

“ In Helen Kylin’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet 258, ‘When Silence Becomes Singing,’ she remembers the words of one Friend during a meeting: ‘‘A rest in a musical composition is as important to the music as the notes. There is no music in a rest but there is the making of music’’ (4). We like to think that silence fills the air. Stuffed like a mouth full of shitty gummy worms. We digest silence on the tips of our tongues, hoping that when we swallow we might hear something beautiful. Silence exists so we can wallow in possibility.

“ We like that the silence of Meeting is subversive. Jarring, maybe, too. That a room could come together and sit still in a type of quiet. It seems strange, no? An entire room of people? Silent? The quiet lets you hold on. Or maybe it makes you hold on. It makes you hold onto your body. Listen to the way the bench creaks as it shifts under your weight. And to hold onto the people in the room, too. To welcome an errant fart—met with a smile and stifled giggles.

“

So maybe yes. Maybe, we could be friends for 300 years and we would never even speak. We would never fight, right? Wouldn’t that be nice? Just hold on, tight. Sing a silent song without speaking.

There’s a lightness in how her breath mixes with mic feedback as her lips clap shut.

PLUM LUARD B’26 hasn’t had “working” earbuds in months.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds

NAN/JACK DICKERSON B’26, oil based ink on paper

CPax

Canada Goose Jacket

Goyard Bags

CS 19

South Kensington British Internationals

Jane Street Internship Being from Greenwich, CT

Being from Westchester, NY

. CULTURAL

Going to Lindemann Opening

I.M.P. Bluesky

Indian Internationals in SASA ∆Hobbes Applied Mathematics B.A.

Loro Piana

∆Habermas

IAPA

Sailing Team

iPad

CS-Econ B.A.

CS 17

Small Format

Being a PLME

Swifties Tech House

Carhartt Detroit .ECONOMIC.

Bubble Tea

J. Crew

Spikeball Starbucks Athanaeum

Apolitical Lesbianism

Vaping

Miller High Life

CS Office Hours

Liking Marvel Depop

Spin Scooters

Liking Dean Zia

Spoken Word

Sci Li

∆Nietzsche

Brown YDSA

Curly Girl Method

Computer Science BSc

Weed (Edibles)

Russophiles

North House

The Granoff Cocaine Spring Weekend Molly West House

Tote Bags

New Yorker Tote Bag

Liking Swans (Men)

Ultimate Frisbee

Liking Jazz (not Free)

APMA 1650 Ivy Film Festival Spring Weekend

Old Navy Adidas Samba

GNSS B.A. Zete

Waterfire Bi Women (Non-Practicing)

2024 Spring Weekend Lineup Hater r/Providence Posting

Aroma Joe’s Sociology B.A.

Weed (Pen)

Anime

∆Bourdieu

( TEXT TANVI ANAND DESIGN SAM STEWART )

(My Best Guess) College Cloutonomics

c The social economy of the collegiate space is uniquely clout-based: what does it mean to be spotted in Thayer Street Starbucks versus in Coffee Exchange on Wickenden? To be caught watching Family Guy instead of reading Foucault? To be labeled a Russophile rather than a Lusophile?

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might not be the cloutiest social theorist (on my chart he is situated between Weed (Pen) and Snapchat; the clouty social theorist award would probably go to Paul Preciado…), but Bourdieu is a theorist of clout (which he calls “cultural capital”). Cultural capital depends on the same illusion of scarcity that underpins economic capital, deriving

Birdwatching

Pure Mathematics PhD

∆bell hooks ∆Puar

Dog on Campus Football Team

CS 15 r/LGBT Family Guy Snapchat

D&D

Anthropology B.A.

American Studies B.A.

CS 111 Instagram

Septum Piercing Weed (Bong)

its value through the constant renegotiation of its very markers. Take, for example, the stampede of Adidas Sambas that you saw in the mail room while picking up your W-2 (it’s tax season, baby…). The low-profile football shoe became a marker of a certain social milieu when it was adopted by Lower East Side it-girls. Now worn by Conservative PM Rishi Sunak (with an awful pair of slim-taper slacks), the Samba is a marker of a certain social milieu, but definitely not the one it used to be.

Bourdieu argues that the designation of certain objects (their “exclusive appropriation”) as “clouty” or “poser-y” is a battle on class terms. Once an object is identified as “having clout” by

the general public (rather than a group of trustfund art snobs), it becomes déclassé, cringe even.

Bourdieu, writing in Paris in the 1970s, identifies the specific “cultural goods” that serve as markers of clout, or what he calls “distinction.” It is important to note that he is implying that the selection of said clouty goods is unconscious and appears as natural, for it is a product of one’s “cultivated dispositions” that arise from existing in the world. The ‘markers of clout’ are invariably different in the field of Brown University in 2024, regardless of how much I would like to believe that the apex of campus clout-hood resides in owning an epic hi-fi system. Bourdieu plotted the markers of distinction in an immensely

SOTG

The RealReal

Nice Apartment on Benefit St n+1 Internship

Japanese Raw Denim

The Indy

Being from Switzerland

Freitag Bags

∆Spivak

SSENSE

Hay Library

European Internationals Who Smoke Cigs

Francophiles

Gay Men

Lusophiles

Bi Men

Being from Philly

∆Derrida

Steps of Faunce

∆Deleuze

Americans in Berlin

Where The Indy Thinks it is

NYC-Raised Artist Parents

Clothes Made out of Natural Fibers

Bi Women (Practicing)

Americans Who Smoke Cigs

Listening to Radiohead

∆Björk

∆Preciado

The Underground (Day)

1911

Sarah Doyle Center

History B.A.

Amsterdam BMP SJP Sunrise

Weed (Joints)

Shoegaze

Free Jazz

Being from Western Mass Bengali Leftists Germanophiles

Being from New Jersey

r/Providence Lurking

SDC Library

Ketamine

Leftist Professor Parents (Tenured)

∆Lacan The Rock

∆Mbembe

∆Foucault Coffee Exchange

Liking Swans (Women) Political Lesbianism

Comp Lit B.A.

RISD Sculpture BFA

College Hill Cloutonomics

MCM Production Track Post-Punk (Windmill)

Nelson Center Berlin Startup Program

RISD Animation

Frankfurt School (Excluding Habermas)

Ridgewood(?)

Louis Family Restaurant

Owning a Subaru

“Serving Cunt”

Thayer St Baja’s (North)

Jo’s at Closing Time

AS220

∆Marx

MCM 150 (Azoulay)

eBay Grailed

MCM Theory Track B.A.

Brown Noser

Keffiyeh

Secondhand Bike

Montreal

Unabomber

detailed chart titled “The Space of Life-Styles”—one of his many schematizations of the relationship between cultural and economic capital. He relied on extensive interviews, newspaper clippings, and collected an absurd amount of statistical data to identify the markers of distinction. Then, he was able to assert with statistical likelihood (rather than deterministically) that members of a certain group likely have an affinity for certain cultural goods.

Unfortunately, I have not yet taken my required Sociological Methods class. Instead, I have made a highly unscientific assessment based on my (rare) engagements with “the social” at Brown University. Pen and notebook in hand, I decided

Twitter

Ubuweb

Android Flip Phone

to play ethnographer and map out said “distinctive signs.” But alas, dear reader, my very identification of these “signs” has already de-cloutified them: they will now be associated with a Sociology student’s ersatz research project in a college newspaper often used as impromptu gift-wrap.

NOTE TO READER:

When reading this chart it is important to note that I am noting objects and practices associated with a certain social space. I am suggesting a probabilistic likelihood rather than a social determinism. Owning an object or exhibiting a given practice that is part

Palestine Pins

TWLO

of a certain section of the chart does not necessarily guarantee one’s economic and cultural social positioning; rather, it is just probabilistically likely.

∆ = the act of invoking a given social theorist (rather than the economic-cultural positioning of the theorists themselves).

TANVI ANAND B’26 is probably in between Vaping and Miller High Life

Frobenius Monoids

c In 2012, the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki (Kyoto University) published a paper titled “INTER-UNIVERSAL TEICHMÜLLER THEORY I: CONSTRUCTION OF HODGE THEATERS,” which outlined his new titular theory defined as “an arithmetic version of Teichmüller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve.” Mochizuki’s paper, which introduced copious amounts of newly created mathematical terminology such as “Frobenioids,” “Hodge Theaters,” “initial Θ-data,” “alien ring structures,” and so on, proposed that this new mathematical system allowed him to prove numerous unsettled propositions, chief among them the long-disputed abc conjecture.1 That is to say—Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory (IUTT for short) presented nothing less than a radical step forward in the world of pure mathematics. There was just one problem: nobody understood what any of this meant.

Those of us failing to read (and write) the last paragraph can take a deep breath—in fact, even for leading experts in the field of anabelian geometry, a subcategory of number theory, Mochizuki’s paper made no sense. The terminology used was rarely explained, and it seemed the work of reconstructing the argument would take as much effort as required to write an entirely new paper. On his blog, the math ematician Jordan Ellenberg (UW Madison) summa rized the difficulty: “Well, now the time has come. I have not even begun to understand Shin’s approach to the conjecture… Looking at it, you feel a bit like you might be reading a paper from the future, or from outer space.” Nonetheless, the problems seemed to remain largely ones of understanding, not truth. Ellenberg remained convinced that the theory was “tremendously exciting.”

As time passed, however, rereadings and analysis of Mochizuki’s paper seemed to yield no better understanding of his methods. A workshop held at Oxford University in 2015 promised to dive deep into the paper, bringing together experts from around the world to finally clear these questions up once and for all. But, as Brian Conrad (Stanford), one of the attendees, would summarize: “The workshop did not provide the ‘aha!’ moment that many were hoping would take place.” In fact, the more they seemed to delve into IUTT, the more frustrated and confused they seemed to get. Conrad remarks, for example, that “we were shown (at high speed) the definition of a rather elaborate notion called a ‘Hodge theater,’ but were never told in clear succinct terms why such an elaborate structure is entirely needed.”

1 In simplest terms, the abc conjecture states that the product of the distinct prime factors of three relatively prime positive integers a, b, and c is usually not much smaller than c

Intuitionist Mat h and SocialTex ts

abc is still a conjecture” which declared that there was a major error in Corollary 3.12 that invalidated the entire theory. Mochizuki’s response? They simply didn’t understand.

So, what gives? Was Mochizuki just making all of this up for mathematical clout? Were his Frobenoids

ciple of the excluded middle” (PEM), the long-held logical law that asserted that every proposition was necessarily either true or false. For Brouwer, the PEM was problematic because it presupposes the existence of a “truth” external to the constructions of math. Truth, for Brouwer, boils down to whether one

clunky and difficult to be sustainable. Philosophical issues about the foundations of math aside, it’s pretty easy to just keep on developing conjectures and proving theorems that almost always work.

So perhaps it doesn’t make sense to evaluate Mochizuki’s paper from Brouwer’s mathematical perspective. But I think his intuitionism reveals something else, namely, a problem with logic and its rejection of interpretation.

In an earlier philosophical treatise written when he was 24 titled Life, Art, and Mysticism, Brouwer remarked on the structure of mathematical practice in a section aptly titled “Man’s Downfall, Caused by Intellect.” In it, it is as if he predicts the very mathematical crisis he would instigate years later: “Every branch of science will therefore run into ever deeper trouble; when it climbs too high it is almost completely shrouded in even greater isolation, where the remembered results of that science take on an independent existence…As they climb higher and higher confusion grows until they are completely deranged.” (from my trip through the pure-mathblogosphere, I’d tend to agree.)

Brouwer’s critique is of the scientific process as reified into an “independent existence” via logical methods which presume a universal truth. The manipulation of concepts via the exclusively logical properties of those concepts separates what one is doing from one’s understanding of it. For Brouwer, then, intuitionism remains a hermeneutic act: “A scientific truth is nothing but a certain infatuation of the desire here located exclusively in the head.”

Made-up or not, then, scientific truth remains bound up for Brouwer in a method of interpretation, where the understanding of truth is what justifies it rather than logical systems. Once again, the rejection of the PEM supports this function: any proposition is not presupposed but only constructed through interpretation, and thus prior to this interpretation exists as neither true nor false.

There is no fundamental difference, then, between “logical” methods and a made-up proposition—the difference lies in the way each is interpreted. Brouwer even goes so far as to say that art is the most immanent form of truth—a radical prospect, certainly, for a mathematician. To assess the truth of Hodge Theaters, then, it might be helpful, at the very least, to know what they mean.

Recently, while attending what shall remain an unnamed humanities conference at Brown, one presenter remarked during a Q+A session that “we can sort of make things up.” This odd declaration of a fundamental artificiality of humanities discourse amidst a crowd of firmly entrenched humanities professors did not go without criticism, but nonetheless was met initially with a hearty share of laughs, perhaps ones that hoped to skip over the rather uncomfortable implications of the question. Can we just make things up?

Critiques of the humanities as “made up” have of course always proliferated, especially amidst debates between ‘humanistic’ and ‘scientific’ perspectives. The famous example is the so-called Sokal affair, where the physicist Alan Sokal, expressing his discontent with a certain brand of post-whateverist thought, submitted a sham paper to a humanities journal (Social Text) claiming that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct, which was subsequently published.

Of course, the real inception of the made-up in this situation, as Jacques Derrida pointed out in a response titled “Sokal and Bricmont Aren’t Serious,” is Sokal himself, who willingly volunteered the information that he had fabricated the entire thing.

Is the Mochizuki situation not, in some sense, the same thing? Sokal himself would certainly bristle at this transfer, and perhaps one could say this (me) is another case of the humanities co-opting mathematical language for their (our) meaningless debates about truth. But purely on the surface, both situations involve a submitted paper whose validity or “truthfulness” is put into question. One admits deception, the other argues that nobody else understands, but is there such a difference?

These points of friction or crisis in intellectual communities, then, do not come just from

epistemological disagreements—those happen all of the time—but from hermeneutic ones. The editors of Social Text, writing in response, noted that Sokal refused to make any of the edits they had suggested: “It was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all.” So Sokal’s article did not take its “sham” nature exclusively from its distortion of theoretical physics but rather because it existed as an intentional suppression of its interpretability.

What unites Sokal and Mochizuki is that they both refuse to open their work up to interpretation—once again, it is a fundamental rejection of an openness to interpretability that invites the problem in. Their work is claimed to be absolute, it exists in a state that should not or cannot be either changed or explained.

Wada, defined as three disjoint connected open sets that share the same boundary. I think we should all spend more time thinking about the Lakes of Wada.

Here is how you construct one:

In the comments of a blog post by Frank Calegari (UChicago) discussing the situation, Dick Gross (Harvard) emphasizes that Mochizuki should simply “give one or two lectures clearly explaining the new ideas in his argument and showing how they lead to a proof of ABC.” Put in those terms, it seems so simple—one wonders why he has never done so.

So, in the spirit of interpretation: while diving down the Brouwer-rabbit-hole, I came across a topological construction called the Lakes of

1) On an island, dig three lakes.

2) We will then decide to dig out the first lake such that anywhere you stand on the island, you are within 1 meter of the lake.

3) The next day, expand the second lake so that you are always within 2 meters of lake 2.

4) On day 3, expand the third lake so that you are always within 3 meters of lake 3.

5) Repeat this process an infinite number of times.

DANIEL ZHENG B’25 is a serious mathematician.

Tell me the birds

( TEXT CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW

DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA

ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG )

c There’s a hat on my writing desk, a very small hat. Moss green and fuzzy, domed, with a scuffed leather patch on the front. A small moss green beanie hat that can fit snug on a pink grapefruit, or a couple of balled up fists. There was a tag on the inside, but I cut off the end with some scissors, sloppily, at an angle. I clipped some wool while doing it, not quite enough to notice. I’ve been thinking of embroidering some red and yellow flowers.

You bring things with you when you go to adventure, and you take things with you when you leave. Sweet water dripping from a leaf onto the back of my left hand, that’ll stay there for a bit. Or the smoothest, roundest rock you have ever seen, sat among the rough and the jagged. I know I’m not supposed to take, but I couldn’t resist. Sandstone, I think. My trail map says to keep going this way, so I will. I brought in my pack an accordion sleeping pad, banana chips, bandages, dry socks.

I’ll have a kid one day. I want at least three. I won’t know what I’m doing when the time comes, I’ve come to terms with that already. It seems to me like no one does. I’ll have a kid, and I’ll raise them to be good, to do good, as well as I can. I’ll raise them to love and be loved, and to hold out their hand. I’ll raise them to question and to answer and to try as hard as they can to see everything. I’ll have to make choices, hard choices, for my kid; I’ll run their lives for the first bit, until I can hand it off to them. I don’t remember what it’s like to be a kid, so I’ll have to trust them. I will hurt them, and they will hurt me, but we will be okay. I will, necessarily, put some of my dreams in them.

The hat is resting on my writing desk, right next to a bendy wooden figurine and a mug that says “Mensch”

in blue letters. It used to be on top of a book; this morning I wanted to read the book, and had to move the hat. It will stay on my desk until I leave this room, and move into another, with a desk or a dresser, and the hat will stay there until I move again. Everywhere I live, this hat will live, finding its place.

The creek is small and unrelenting, and my feet sting from the cold. I long for a tent or a fire; I thank god for dry socks. Up the hill, down the hill, and I receive a small gash on my nose from a tree branch. I can hear my footsteps, and drying leaves knocking into each other, and the shrill song of a bird. Sorrel is lemony and refreshing. It is going to start raining soon. Light through birch leaves is the most beautiful thing.

My kid will love the world, I hope. My kid will love spring growth and smiling at strangers, and feeling ice melt on their tongue. They’ll love and fear the ocean, and the feeling of leaves brushing their face. I’ll introduce my kid to the world from a perch on my shoulders, or a backpack with ample space for them to sit. They’ll learn to squint their eyes away from the sun and let be wasps and leaves of three. Eventually, they’ll have to learn how to treat a blister, or a nettlesting, or cold toes. Or learn how the butterflies might stop coming home. The world will hurt them, and they will hurt the world, but, kid, all will be okay. I hope my kid will love the world, so I’ll do my best.

The second most beautiful thing is taking off your pack at the end of a hike. I dig my hand to the bottom and grab some dry socks, and some granola. Nothing has ever tasted better, to anyone, I think. I unzip my raincoat, and pick burrs from the mesh. There’s an ant walking over my leg, and I swear that we see each other. I look up at the aching blue sky, refreshing after three days of rain, and see it reaching toward me,

and I’m ecstatic and relieved, and oh god am I cold. I reach to the top of my head and peel off a muddy green wool hat, that’s done its best, and shove it deep into my trash bag of laundry-to-be-done. Back home, when unloading the dryer, I pull out the hat, now a quarter of its original size.

Cool air in my nose reminds me of childhood summer mornings. Walking on roots reminds me of gymnastics classes. Carrying weight reminds me of walking down the street with an overdue bag of laundry over my shoulder. I think I hear a noise, but when I look to my right there’s nothing there. Daisies can push potassium from one cell to another, swelling and sucking water, and will keep their faces pointed at the sun.

Tomorrow I’ll buy a table lamp for my home, and sit on the couch and read. Please, tell me the birds will still sing.

I feel the heel of a hiking boot against my chest.

My kid sits on my shoulders and looks at the sky.

They’re wearing a blue fleece and a tiny moss green hat. Sing, kid. Here’s our world.

CALEB STUTMAN-SHAW B’25 is looking to settle down.

Punk, Islam, and the politics of hypervisibility

A specter haunts the archives of the U.S.’s largest news publications—the specter of punk Islam. In the back pages of The Guardian, The New York Times, and CNN lies a host of articles with provocative titles like “Punk meets Islam for a new generation in the U.S.,” “Mohawks and Korans: Taqwacores Punk Mash-up,” “‘Taqwacores’: Muslim, Misfit And Making A Noise,” “How Islamic punk went from fiction to reality,” “Taqwacore: Burqas and Mohawks.” Taqwacore, a portmanteau coined by author Muhmmad M. Knight in his novel The Taqwacores, combines the Arabic word ‘taqwa’ (translating to God-fearing piety) and ‘core’ (referring to the punk rock subgenre, ‘hardcore.’). Knight, a Muslim revert, wrote the novel in 2002, distributing it from his pickup truck at mosques until it got picked up by Soft Skull Press in 2007. The novel follows a punk house in Buffalo, New York inhabited by a cast of Muslim mavericks including “burqa-wearing ‘riot grrls,’ mohawked Sufis, straightedge Sunnis, Shi’a skinheads, Indonesian skaters, Sudanese rude boys, gay Muslims, drunk Muslims, and feminists.”

Knight's novel spoke to young Muslims disenchanted by the rigidity of traditional Islamic society. It charted a subversive ethic rooted in the self-actualization of religious values averse to orthodox interpretations of Islam and imbued with the anti-establishment, do-it-yourself punk ethos. Knight writes that both Islam and punk are amorphous ideologies that refuse easy definition: “You cannot hold Punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want them to?”

Punk arose from working-class communities in Thatcher-era UK and Reagan-era America during the 1970s and 80s. Protesting racial capitalist exploitation, Black and brown punk bands, like Death and Bad Brains, pioneered the movement. However, writer and musician Greg Tate for an interview with AJ+ explains how “Jim Crow notions of racial separation and segregation” stripped Black punk artists of visibility as leaders of the punk sound. As such, predominantly white punk bands like The Clash and The Ramones became synonymous with punk rock. From the beginning of the movement, punk was often associated with anarchism through the use of Situationist (a collective of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who developed a critique of capitalism founded in Marxist theory and surrealism) iconography by anarcho-punk bands like Crass and Conflict. But, there was always an ambivalence about what the political ends of punk should look like.

Even today, punk and anarchism are often associated with one another, and both ostensibly defined by whiteness. Anarchist Otto Nomous writes that many anarchists are drawn to the ideology from punk’s anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical tenor and exposure to “angry, passionate lyrics of anarcho-punk bands, ‘do-it-yourself’ zines, and countless other sources of information that are circulated within the underground punk distribution networks.” Nomous goes on to explain that “It is by no coincidence that the punk scene also shares the familiar demographic as its counterpart [anarchism], of mostly white, male, suburban, middle class youths.”

Ideologically, Taqwacore, as defined by Knight’s novel, appears to be an iteration of anarcho-punk ideology founded in a self-derived interpretation of Islam (the concept in Islamic jurisprudence of ijtihad, literally ‘effort’). The introduction to Knight’s novel, a poem titled “Muhammad Was a Punk Rocker,” recontextualizes the revolutionary, anti-status quo politics of the Prophet within a modern punk visual lexicon:

“...Muhammad was a punk rocker he tore everything down

Muhammad was a punk rocker and he rocked that town

All the people in Mecca knew Muhammad’s name they knew him by his fucked-up hair and dangling wallet chain

They knew him by his spikes and said he was insane but Ali knew better Uncle wouldn’t play their game

Muhammad was a punk rocker you know he tore shit up

Muhammad was a punk rocker Rancid sticker on his pickup truck

When he was in a dumpster by himself Allah told him crazy things for Muhammad to share with all of us on his six holy strings”

In his book Islam and Anarchism, Mohamed Abdou describes ijtihad as the “utility of employing independent and rigorous reasoning while re(interpreting) Islamic principles in the Sunnah (prophetic practice), ahadith (Prophetic Oral Tradition), and the Qur’an.” Abdou proposes anarchic ijtihad as the central analytic in the formulation of an ‘AnarchaIslam’—a political theory that challenges the feigned oppositions between Islam and anarchist thought (namely, that a religion supposedly founded in strict rules cannot be applied to anarchism’s rejection of imposed order and coercion). Abdou uses anarchic ijtihad to show how “Islam is incompatible with modern capitalist-state frameworks,” citing verses from the Quran alongside Black anarchist, decolonial, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Anarcha-Islam seems to chart a similar radical, religio-political principle to Taqwacore’s insurgent polemics Abdou challenges the sympathetic relationships between some diasporic Muslims to neoliberal, settler-colonial ideologies that affirm anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Knight has similarly critiqued leaders of the Muslim American community who attempt to construct themselves as ‘good Muslims’ in their alignment with liberal stateinterests during the US’ so-called ‘War on Terror.’ In Blue-Eyed Devil, Knight documents his encounters with several members of the Bush-allied group, Muslims for America. He writes about the Republican political pundit Asma Gull Hasan, who supported the US invasion of Iraq and whose family founded Muslims for America:

(

TEXT ARMAN DEENDAR

DESIGN ANDREW LIU

ILLUSTRATION REN LONG )

“Asma said that she liked George W. Bush because of his “outreach to Muslims,” which meant that he hosted Ramadan dinner in the White House. ‘I’d rather he skipped the dinner and just stopped bombing people,’ I told her.”

In 2007, Hasan would go on to file a defamation lawsuit against both Knight and The Kominas, a band associated with Taqwacore. In “Rumi Was a Homo” the band sings in the first verse, “You give better handjobs than Asma Hassan,” ironically chastising Hassan’s crafted persona as a ‘good, America-loving, Muslim.’ Similarly, on the interlude to the track “I want a Hand Job” off of their debut album, Wild Nights on Guantanamo Bay, The Kominas parody Muslims for America, singing “we’re American Muslims, the only thing we guzzle more than oil is the blood of our own people.”

Similarly, Abdou critiques Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar in Islam and Anarchism for her Obama-sympathy and love for the good ol’ American values of justice, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He theorizes that diasporic Muslims, irrespective of party affiliation, like Omar and groups like Muslims for America who subscribe to settlercolonial and neoliberal politics do so out of a crisis of identity. A crisis rooted in proving loyalty to the nation-state whilst also “assimilating to a EuroAmerican identity formation and cultural formation ‘based on the territorial dispersal and political fragmentation’ of Muslims.”

Taqwacore turns this crisis on its head with a big ‘fuck you.’ Bands like The Kominas’ DIY experimentation compounded by poetic irony refuses a Rupi Kaur-esque, assimilationist, nostalgia-forhomeland, diasporic aesthetic. On “Blow Shit Up” from Wild Nights on Guantanamo Bay, they affirm “I don’t want assimilation, I just want to blow shit up!”

Following in the legacy of pioneering Black punks of 80s hardcore who combined the sounds of traditional reggae with budding punk rock, The Kominas’ genre-fucking melds heavy metal, bhangra, Bollywood, and screamo to produce a musical terrain that transcends an easy ‘East meets West’ characterization. On the track, “Par Desi,” (lit. ‘diaspora’ in Urdu) The Kominas interpolate a classic Punjabi motif on the electric guitar while lamenting the anachronisms of their diasporic subjectivity. (“No time for the 99 names amidst the noise and clamor” / “How’d I get here, from the land of long monsoons?”)—‘99 names’ referencing the 99 names of Allah and ‘the land of long monsoons’ referencing South Asia. The Kominas embody Knight’s political conceptualization of Taqwacore: “In the so-called war of civilizations, we’re putting the middle finger in both directions, ya know? Fuck you and fuck you,” he says in the documentary Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (2009) by Omar Majeed.

The documentary followed Knight and five bands—The Kominas, Secret Trial Five, AlThawra, Vote Hezbollah, and Diacritical—on their 2007 tour throughout the United States and Pakistan. The group traveled the US in a remodeled green school bus decorated with graffiti reading “Flags Kill” and “I <3 Allah,” an ‘Exit’ sign followed by “From Iraq” written in Sharpie, and an American flag used as a doormat at its entrance.

As this visual symbolism suggests, the scene’s second middle finger was pointed towards the US’ ‘War on Terror’ and the racialization of Muslims after 9/11. Marxist historian Vijay Prashad likens the state’s response to 9/11 to a new McCarthyism, where the existential enemy of the state shifted from the ‘dirty communist’ to the ‘radical Muslim terrorist.’ During this period, the state undertook extensive domestic digital and physical surveillance projects under the guise of ‘counter-terrorism’ and ‘state intelligence.’ In addition to the invasive mapping of Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike based on a list of “Ancestries of Interest” that included anyone with connections to countries in the Middle East and South Asia, the NYPD illegally infiltrated mosques and student groups in the years following 9/11. These surveillance strategies intended to make the Muslim body legible and lumped non-Muslims (for example, Sikh Americans) into the category of racial Other in spite of their difference in faith. The Kominas’ song, “Sharia Law in the USA” off their debut album Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay, comments on the racial logics defining the era:

“I am an Islamist

I am the antichrist

Most squares can’t make Most Wanted lists

But my my how I stay in style

Cops chased me out of my Mother’s womb

My crib was in State Pen before age two and The Feds had bugged my red toy phone

So I devised a plan for heads to roll…”

The 2001 USA Patriot Act signed under the Bush administration expanded (but did not foundationally alter) the state’s carceral power by removing legal due process for non-citizens suspected of ‘terrorism.’ The Act transformed the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba into a prison to detain the state’s ‘threats to national security.’ It has been well documented that the ‘political prisoners’ incarcerated in Guantanomo Bay faced inhumane conditions and were denied any legal representation. The Secret Trial Five (the only women-led band highlighted in the documentary) song “Hey Hey Guantanamo Bay” evidences their critique of the US’ carcerality:

“Hey Hey Hey Guantanamo Bay

I’d like to switch off all of your locks

Watch the prisoners walk out in flocks

Line up the torturers, put rocks in their cots

Just a little payback for the hard knocks.”

Attempts to translate Knight’s manifesto to the actual bands that comprised the scene were overzealous extrap-olations at best. Underscoring the scene’s fiery sonic polemics and unified visual aesthetics is the fact that it was never a ‘real’ scene to begin with. I briefly spoke to Shahjehan Khan, a member of The Kominas, who told me how white journalists fetishized the band, essentializing them under the label, ‘Muslim punks.’ In a Los Angeles Times article from 2009 titled “Nevermind the Islam. It’s punk,” Khan describes how the media attention they were receiving obfuscated the actual music they were making: “No one actually gave us an album review; it was always ‘Oh look at this, it’s shocking.”

This media sensationalization is exemplary of the hegemonic Orientalist discourses used to describe Muslims and those racialized as Muslim even before 9/11. Edward Said’s follow-up to Orientalism, Covering Islam, expands upon his earlier work with a focus on how Western media reinforces essentialized understandings of Islam and Muslims. Said posits that the use of the term ‘Islam’ in Western media is “part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation for a religion called Islam.” The use of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ more broadly by the Western media operates as a phantasmic, imagined label born out of civilizational discourses used to justify colonial domination. In a similar vein, Knight writes in The Taqwacores that both punk and Islam “are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from the truth.”

The fixation on their identities as Muslims led many of the bands to reject the label of Taqwacore altogether as it became increasingly hypervisible in the media. Secret Trial Five staunchly rejected the scene and disavowed any relationship to Knight shortly after the documentary was released in their song “We’re not Taqwacore:”

“rather hang with taliban than dick around with drunks muhammad wasn’t white and neither is this fight and we weren’t birthed by michael knight we’re not taqwacore”

I first encountered Taqwacore during one of my nightly Twitter doom-scrolls and have been infatuated with the ‘scene’ ever since. As the trans-communo-Muzzie that I am, I was like “hey look at these Muslims that are non-normative and also care about left politics, I have to know everything about them.” But, my identitarian relationality with Taqwacore was based in the very essentialization that spurred the bands’ disillusionment with the movement. For me, it was about their Muslimness and not about their punk because of my desire for subversive diasporic representation. Yeah, I know, I’m a poser.

The harsh reality of representation is that I would not have found Taqwacore without the scene's hypervisibility—one that seems to be at odds with the informality and alterity of punk. But, can we really have a post-identitarian relationality when both ‘identity’ and ‘relationality’ themselves are fixed by the violence of power-knowledge?

As I’ve listened to more and more ‘Taqwacore,’ I somewhat release myself from the ‘Islamic’ character of the music that first pulled me in It is objectively just really good music. It transforms familiar linguistic and sonic landscapes into an audiovisual niche that, like all great punk, unabashedly refuses definition. Islam, punk, and anarchism might all be inherent to Taqwacore, but how much does it really matter when you’re head-banging alone in your room at 2AM on a Wednesday?

ARMAN DEENDAR B’25

COLIN ORIHUELA B’24

An Interpretation of Dreams: Massachusetts,

strange shapes, and Indie’s got simple dreams

When I floated the idea of “dreams” being my penultimate conquest as Indie, I met some confused looks. But,S******,youdon’tknowanythingaboutdreams. Youdidn’teventaketheFreudclass. Well, first off, let me tell you: this is much deeper than psychoanalysis. Freud couldn’t do what I’m about to do—he simply wouldn’t be able to handle it! And secondly, I’m an avid dreamer. I used to have a recurring nightmare that Plankton from Spongebobwas trying to eat me as I was on one of those kiddie swings, and I couldn’t get out. And one where a T-Rex followed me down an alley and I knew it was eating chunks of my flesh, but it didn’t seem all that bad. Also, sometimes I dreamed I peed my pants.

My girlfriend cheated on me in my dream. I know it doesn’t mean anything in reality, but why did I dream of it?

( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND DESIGN OLLANTAY AVILA )

But now I’m older and don’t get quitegood enough REM sleep, so day-dreaming has been my kick. Right now, I’m dreaming of warmer weather and my thesis being in. And free ice cream once a week. And a world in which the couple next to me in the Rock isn’t making out. Some of these might come true, but at the rate they’re going, the latter won’t be one of them. Anyways, enough of me and my super interesting life. You’ve sent me your dreams, and, fueled by a deadline and the power of the eclipse, I’m here to tell you what it all means. How hard can it be?

Your girlfriend probably cheated on you. Get really really mad at her. Don’t tell her why.

I recently had a nightmare about trying to get over the border of Massachusetts into Providence. As we traversed the woody terrain on foot, trying to jump on trains and buses and find safe houses when we could, we were being ruthlessly hunted and pursued.

We’ve been here for too fucking long. This is your sign to graduate and not look back. Also—definitely something to do about Massholes. Avoid Dunkin’ for a while.

There are these blue, 3-D organic shapes and they dance around in the top rack of the dishwasher before jumping up onto the counter and playing more up there. There's very dark lighting in the kitchen and all of the shapes are kind of a washed-out color. The dream has been recurring since I was in early elementary school.

In the sink. I’m a baby for twenty-five minutes while there’s a dinner party. Look at all the people walking in… my ex-girlfriend’s ex walks in and starts laughing and eating a giant carrot cake.

I’m sensing that parties are hard for you. As well as maybe your childhood. And relationships. Twenty five minutes… does that have something to do with the Pomodoro Method? Geez. You’ve got it tough.

I’m at my childhood home, and there’s a gang of burglars that have broken in. But for some reason they’re also trying to chase me. So I escape through the window and start jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I can sort of fly but not really. I always wake up really sweaty, sometimes in the middle of the chase.

Do you feel like you’re always the pursued, not the pursuer in romantic situationships? Why is that?

Paranoid that they’ll want you, and then discover that you have nothing of worth, and throw you away? Do you panic about how to get out of close, intimate relationships? Also, maybe you’re moving around in your sleep… sweaty is not normal! Very bad. And you probably have latent flying powers that you should try exploring. Man, packed dream, huh?

Metro Boomin comes to me and tells me he wants me to be one of the three people who get to meet him. I keep trying to relay this information to the Brown Lecture Board, but they won’t listen to me.

People have trouble believing you because you’re a liar.

This one stumped me for a bit, but it’s very clear to me now. You watched AlvinandtheChipmunks when you were young and are remembering the dishwasher scene where Alvin sings Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls. This was probably your sexual awakening, and it comes back when you’re feeling sexually frustrated. Hence the simultaneity of the washed-out colors and the dancing on the counter. Let loose a little!

Ski slope but I can ski uphill. That’s tight.

I keep having apocalyptic dreams where Earth is pretty much fucked and I’m going to have to face death and feel the feeling of instant death face-on. Can’t really explain it but it’s like if you were waiting to feel what it was like to be in an explosion. And I’m always scared. (I’m in therapy.)

You seem like a happy person— good things are coming your way. Honestly, cut the therapy if you want.

I wake up in my dream and find that my teeth have fallen out. I looked it up and it says it’s a stress dream, but I don’t know what I’m stressed about.

I got tricked into putting the kid I babysit into an electric box. Not sure if the box was dangerous or not, but it was definitely electric.

Don’t have kids.

This is definitely about dental hygiene. That new toothpaste you got when you were feeling adventurous? It’s not working out for you.

04/11/24

The Bulletin

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!

Arts

Animation Screening

Sunday 4/14 @7:30 PM

14 Olneyville Square, Providence, RI

If you’re looking for an entertaining and lighthearted night, look no further! The feminist artist space Dirt Palace is hosting an animation screening Sunday night with the theme of Stick and Bindle. The event is organized by Exyl, a visual artist, animation filmmaker, and Dirt Palace resident. Doors open at 7:30 and the screening begins at 8:00. Please bring your mask and, if possible, a $10-15 entry fee—but all are welcome regardless of payment.

Fashion as Resistance

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 institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.

The Wheeler School and The Stop Torture RI

Coalition Fundraiser

Saturday 4/20 @12PM-3PM

Providence Public Library, 150 Empire St, Providence, RI

Join The Wheeler School and The Stop Torture RI Coalition in raising awareness about solitary confinement and helping previously incarcerated persons. The fundraiser will include foods, drinks, music, and more! More info can be found in the bio of @ reformsolitaryri

Wide Awakes Collective

Thursday 4/11 @6PM-7:30PM

Instagram: @wideawakescollective

Venmo: @WideAwakes-PVD

CashApp: $wideawakesPVD

Based in Kennedy Plaza, Wide Awakes is an organization that engages in mutual aid and direct action, centering abolition. They have paused new requests for mutual aid because of limited capacity, but there are some outstanding flyers, pinned on their Instagram account, that you can still donate to. These requests include housing and flood relief funds.

Tuesday 4/16 @7:00 - 8:30 PM

Pembroke 305 at 172 Meeting Street, Providence, RI 02906

Through engaging both the scholarly and creative, this event centers the possibilities of fashion for the queer and trans community, especially queer and trans people of color. Co-sponsored by the BCSC and as part of the LGBTQ Center’s Queer Legacy Series, the event will feature Dr. Van Bailey, who works in advocacy, education, and fashion curation.

SWEET! PVD Reading Series

Wednesday 4/17 @7PM

DM @s_w_e_e_t_pvd on Instagram for the address

Come join SWEET! PVD’s next event in their queer poetry and mixed disciplinary reading series. In collaboration with Lost Bag, a community arts space, this reading features Astrid Drew, Audrey B., RL Wheeler (from The Indy!), and Zoe Roden and Anna Kerber performing together as “That’s My Baby, You’re My Wife.” Doors open at 7 and the event starts at 7:30. Bring a mask and, if possible, the recommended $10 entry fee, but all are welcome regardless of funds.

Open Mic and Qualifier Poetry Slam

Thursday 4/18 @7PM

115 Empire St, Providence, RI

Curated by Kei Soares Cobb and Becci Davis, this exhibition thinks about liberation through human relationships to the ocean with a primary focus on Captain William A. Martin, a Black whaling-ship captain during the nineteenth century. In addition to being open for more casual viewing, there are also scheduled activation days each Saturday and some Mondays where you will be guided through the exhibition with exercises.

The Black Music Project

Friday 4/19 @7PM

William Reilly Hall at 144 Angell St, Providence, RI

This performance highlights music from the African diaspora and will take place at the Lindemann Performing Arts Center. There are three featured artists: Aaliyah, Cazir, and Jada. The doors open at 6:30 PM and the event begins at 7 PM. You can scan the QR code on @cazir.music’s Instagram page to view the full set list!

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

April 15th Strike for Gaza

Monday 4/15

On Tax Day, join the national strike against the genocide in Gaza by walking out of work and school, as well as abstaining from any spending. This strike in solidarity aims to increase pressure on the U.S. administration to take action towards ending the genocide— you can find more information at strike4gaza.org

Justice Circle

Monday 4/15 @6PM-9PM

Southside Cultural Center of RI, 393 Broad Street, Providence, RI

Join SISTA Fire’s monthly membership meeting, which includes dinner and networking! This event is open to all women of color and nonbinary POC in Rhode Island. If you are bringing children, childcare will be provided, but please note their names, ages, and dietary restrictions when registering at the link bit.ly/AprilJC2024

The Womxn of Color Reception

Wednesday 4/17 @5:30PM-7PM

Brown University Faculty Club, 1 Bannister St, Providence, RI

All wome/y/xn, femmes, trans-feminine, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people of color are invited to The Womxn of Color Reception to be in community and celebration. There will be light refreshments served. This event is hosted by The Brown Center for Students of Color, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender, and the Office of Institutional Equity & Diversity—the link to RSVP is https://tinyurl.com/yyp8r2ak

Earth Day Volunteering at Roger Williams Park

Friday 4/19 @10AM-3PM

Providence Foundation, 30 Exchange Terrace, Providence, RI

For Earth Day, volunteer to clean up and preserve the Roger Williams Park! After, you can stay for the Mayor’s Earth Day Wonder of Water Celebration from noon to 3pm. The volunteer group will meet at the Clark and Dairymple Boathouse—the link to sign up can be found in the bio of @rogerwilliamspark

Women’s Wisdom Exchange

Wednesday 4/24 @6PM-8PM

Res American Bistro, 123 Empire St, Providence, RI

This month’s Women’s Wisdom Exchange brings women together for an evening of celebration—there will be keynote speakers, vendors, and complementary snacks! In honor of National Poetry Month, @ clariseannettebrooks will read and speak at the event. You can RSVP by emailing PVDexperiences@gmail. com, and if you are interested in speaking or venturing for the event, please DM @pvd.experiences

Brown University’s 21st Annual Spring Thaw Powwow

Saturday 4/27 @11AM-5PM

235 Hope St, Providence, RI

Join Brown University’s Indigenous community for the 21st Annual Spring Thaw Powwow! There will be a dance competition, sweetheart special, and various intertribal performances—you can find the lineup at @nab.brownu or @bcscheritageseries. In addition, you can find crafts and jewelry vendors and amazing food during the day! This event has free admission and is open to the public!