The College Hill Independent —Vol 46 Issue 5

This Issue

11

Katherine Xiong, Mari Fajnzylber, Sacha Sloan, Lizzy Zhang, Kian Braulik, Vini Rupchandani, Maddock Thomas & Maxwell Robinson

Masthead*

MANAGING EDITORS

Zachary Braner

Lucia Kan-Sperling

Ella Spungen

WEEK IN REVIEW

Karlos Bautista

Morgan Varnado

ARTS

Kian Braulik

Corinne Leong

Charlie Medeiros

EPHEMERA

Ayça Ülgen

Livia Weiner

FEATURES

Madeline Canfield

Jane Wang

LITERARY

Ryan Chuang

Evan Donnachie

Anabelle Johnston

METRO

Jack Doughty

Rose Houglet

Sacha Sloan

SCIENCE + TECH

Eric Guo

Angela Qian

Katherine Xiong

WORLD

Everest Maya-Tudor

Lily Seltz

X

Claire Chasse

DEAR INDY

Annie Stein

BULLETIN BOARD

Mark Buckley

Kayla Morrison

SENIOR EDITORS

Sage Jennings

Anabelle Johnston

Corinne Leong

Isaac McKenna

Sacha Sloan

Jane Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Tanvi Anand

Cecilia Barron

Graciela Bautista

Mariana Fajnzylber

Saraphina Forman

Keelin Gaughan

Sarah Goldman

Jonathan Green

Sarah Holloway

Anushka Kataruka

Roza Kavak

Nicole Konecke

Cameron Leo

Abani Neferkara

Justin Scheer

Julia Vaz

Kathy/Siqi Wang

Madeleine Young

COPY CHIEF

Addie Allen

COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS

Qiaoying Chen

Veronica Dickstein

Eleanor Dushin

Aidan Harbison

Doren Hsiao-Wecksler

Jasmine Li

Rebecca Martin-Welp

Kabir Narayanan

Eleanor Peters

Angelina Rios-Galindo

Taleen Sample

Angela Sha

Jean Wanlass

Michelle Yuan

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR

Angela Lian

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Kian Braulik

Angela Lian

Natalie Mitchell

WEB MANAGER

Isaac McKenna

WEB EDITORS

Hadley Dalton

Arman Deendar

Ash Ma

GAMEMAKERS

Alyscia Batista

Anna Wang

*Our Beloved Staff

COVER COORDINATOR

Zora Gamberg

DESIGN EDITORS

Anna Brinkhuis

Sam Stewart

DESIGNERS

Nicole Ban

Brianna Cheng

Ri Choi

Ashley Guo

Kira Held

Xinyu/Sara Hu

Gina Kang

Amy/Youjin Lim

Andrew Liu

Ash Ma

Jaesun Myung

Tanya Qu

Zoe Rudolph-Larrea

Floria Tsui

Anna Wang

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Sophie Foulkes

Izzy Roth-Dishy

ILLUSTRATORS

Sylvie Bartusek

Lucy Carpenter

Bethenie Carriaga

Julia/Shuo Yun Cheng

Avanee Dalmia

Michelle Ding

Nicholas Edwards

Jameson Enriquez

Lillyanne Fisher

Haimeng Ge

Jacob Gong

Ned Kennedy

Elisa Kim

Sarosh Nadeem

Hannah Park

Luca Suarez

Yanning Sun

Anna Wang

Camilla Watson

Iris Wright

Nor Wu

Celine Yeh

Jane Zhou

MVP

Katherine Xiong

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

From the Editors

This week’s FTE comes to you, exquisitely, as a corpse:

By the time you receive this message, you will be clothed in green and saturated in luck, but we write to you from the Ides of March on up to Conmag and come say hi to the coolest editors in Town morphs into city, melts into one crusted Vitamix blender in a retiled kitchen in a bungalow of Bricks are not normally used as hair rollers, but Jessica-Anne is not a normal GIRL enters: she immediately trips on a wire while entering through a rabbit hole, stage Left over from last evening’s festivities was a quarter-eaten jar of orange marmalade, a slight singe on the corner of the second placemat, and newsprint stains on the hardwood; just a bit of text was legible—here’s what it Read in an email from my grandpa, I learn he’s feeling fortunate to have a neighbor who cleans their snowy sidewalks with a small motorized tractor-plow.

- The Editors

Mission Statement

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

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

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

Concepts

Concepts Concepts

Concepts

Week in Concepts

AERONAUTIC ADVENTURE

Perhaps there is nothing more pleasant than spending time in Gano Park—whether it’s taking in the pickup basketball games, the intrepid runners that make use of the biking path no matter the weather, the community garden, the overgrown baseball fields, or the rusting bridge.

This week, this Indy writer went down to Gano Park for a few relaxing afternoons—and in hopes of witnessing the most important aviation event in Rhode Island since James Allen inaugurated the state’s aeronautical history with a hot air balloon in 1856.

The takeoff was to be utterly clandestine. No one was to know about it besides the aircraft launch crew—until a source close to the operation subtly informed a concerned Fox Point resident who, in turn, via letter composed in invisible ink, left a tip for the College Hill Independent. Unfortunately, most of the letter didn’t make it to our mailbox—whether by subterfuge or pure accident (there seemed to be indication of animal bite marks, but our laboratory wasn’t able to confirm before print).

The only substantial information that was left of the missive was the location of the launch (Gano Park), a fragmented description of the type of aircraft (a plane), and its color (a light red hue).

I can say I know Gano Park well. Once, when I wasn’t able to fall asleep, I decided to wait until the early morning hours to catch the sunrise at the park. Besides the people working at Dunkin’ on Gano Street, the only person I came across was a neighbor with his sprightly dog, Haverford. The air was crisp when the sun rose. A hazy line of orange started to peep across the horizon, softly glazing the rusting Crook Point Bascule Bridge over the Seekonk River.

Although insomnia no longer lays claim to me, I’ve gained valuable field insight into the park’s terrain from daytime strolls since then that have made me more than prepared to catch this launch.

Without information of a specific date or time, I decided to head down to Gano Park every day until I caught sight of the launch. I skipped the rainy days—no good for any launch, aeronautic or otherwise—and stuck to the afternoons when the sun was most available, as any aerospace technician worth her salt would know.

The first day passed without incident. So too the next day. The day after that, I decided to wait for the leaves on the branches to grow back on the trees instead.

Did the crew know? Were they playing an elaborate trick on my addled brain? (The plane, in all its redness, was all I could think

about—I kept having dreams about missing airline flights.) Had they changed the location of the launch? Or had they already launched the plane under the auspices of night? The Fox Point community—and I especially—needed to know what had either happened already or was just about to happen.

On the fourth day, like the days prior, the field was clear. The weather couldn’t have been any better, the sky any clearer. Then—I caught sight of the red aircraft! … Only to discover that—aerodynamic as it was—it was no larger than the laptop used to draft this dispatch, and of even less sturdy material. The plane was plated with styrofoam. The crew was near non-existent—two people. The young pilot, only barely taller than the plane’s length, waited for her wizened counterpart to give the go-ahead for the

dominated by a rectangular table with seating for audience members on either side. The Cogut Institute for the Humanities was hosting their annual Political Concepts Conference; this year’s was the Literature Edition. Fourteen scholars from diverse fields and universities were invited to share their papers exploring concepts drawn from literature to deconstruct, recast, resignify our current political climate.

My English professor delivered the opening remarks. The atmosphere was friendly, even sporting. They presented their papers in panels two at a time, each on a concept—“Dialogue,” “Greatness,” “Scrap,” and so on— followed by a lengthy Q&A. I had arrived for the final panel of the conference. In the small, adjoining room there were tables laid out with coffee and pastries. It was possible to, while getting a scone, look to the left and see a professor getting a muffin, and later watch him sneak bites during a panel. This was a window into an academia I hadn’t before seen. After the two papers, the other professors immediately jockeyed to get in their questions: stunning questions, long, theoretical and detailed, seemingly endless.

I sat in the front row and crunched loudly on my ice cream cone. It was the loudest bite I have ever made and I was horrified to be seized by a flight of silent, hysterical laughter. This was amplified every time I made eye contact with my friend, who had come with me and was also holding an ice cream cone. I prayed that my English professor wouldn’t notice. We crunched. We dissolved again. He was readying himself to present his own paper, tall, hunched, nodding vigorously. His topic: “Incoherence.”

launch. He watched just a few steps behind his daughter (her coat the same color as the aircraft) as she hobbled along, plane in hand. The flight time was short—only a few seconds—and the plane, carried by the wind, looped back on its flight path before touchdown.

I walked in holding a Ratty ice cream cone. I realized that this was a mistake. We had followed the signs upstairs. Each bore an image of a snowy owl in flight, casting its elegant shadow on a page of text. Now I was in the room: a great big room in Pembroke Hall with high, sloping ceilings

After the talk, we were all invited to join the scholars for dinner at Flatbread. The promise: “great” “dialogue” over “scraps” (pizza) which would hopefully not be “incoherent.” My head swam. “This made me realize that I’m meant to use my body, not my mind,” said my friend, outside. We were talking strangely fast and loud. The air stole our breath, leaving white scrolls drifting between fuzzy specks of rain. The warm, electric glow of Thayer Street felt like light coming from another world. Steady. Mist landed on our faces, in our eyes. We traded the snowy owl for an abstracted, white songbird—meaning, we went to my house and sat on Twitter for several hours.

Saraphina Forman: How did you get started in art?

Leonard Jefferson: We painted in kindergarten. I just liked it and I stuck with it.

SF: When did you start making art once you were incarcerated?

LJ: As soon as I could get access to the materials. They had an arts program inside the prison, in the maximum security building where I was in 1974. I had a flute, and I was able to obtain some materials to produce art.

They taught classes, but the instructor was only there for like an hour or so. So basically what they did was they would show you a technique and they would provide the materials for you to work with.

SF: What is your artistic process like? What makes you start a piece?

LJ: Generally something that attracts my attention. A lot of times, it’s things that are happening socially. I might see an image of something and say, “I would like to reproduce that,” to try to sharpen my skills. Can I paint that? Can I make it look right?

SF: Is your process fast or slow?

LJ: Pretty much everything slow. Like I say, I have two speeds: slow and slower.

SF: Who do you imagine as an audience for your pieces? Do you make art for yourself?

LJ: Pretty much I make it for myself.

SF: Did you have any collaborators in prison? Was there any sort of artist community?

LJ: There were people who, just like me, were in prison. And they took advantage of the access to materials and they painted and they drew. There was a studio only when the instructor was there. So that would be like an hour or maybe two every week when we would all get together.

SF: And then otherwise, would you just work—

LJ: Isolated in the cell.

SF: You mentioned magazines that you would draw from. What other art inspiration was coming in from the outside?

An Interview With

Rendering Mass Incarceration: LEONARD JEFFERSON

Born in Pittsburgh, Leonard Jefferson is a Providence-based artist who survived almost 40 years behind bars in PA and the Adult Correctional Institute (ACI) in Cranston. In 2019, the state Supreme Court overruled the life without parole sentence, which had been imposed unlawfully, and Jefferson was released from the ACI.

Jefferson is a lifelong, self-taught artist working in a variety of 2D media. His art frequently depicts people and incorporates text and political messages. Jefferson was prolific throughout his incarceration, despite his art being confiscated multiple times. He has been featured in exhibits both while in prison and afterwards, including at the RISD Museum, University of Pittsburgh’s Images Exhibition (where he received the Blue Ribbon award), Pittsburgh’s Federal Reserve Bank, the Human Rights Coalition of Philadelphia, the Black Biennial at RISD this past spring, and “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Incarceration” at Brown last fall.

In this interview, Jefferson talks about his artistic process, creating in spite of surveillance, and the role of art in social movements.

LJ: The outside inspiration I got was sometimes things that I saw on television. And from National Geographic.

SF: Did being an artist affect your interpersonal relations at all? Did it set you apart from other people in prison?

LJ: It set me apart because I was into what I was into, and I can’t carry on with the other stuff when I’m trying to concentrate on the canvas and paper.

SF: How many hours a day would you work on art?

LJ: Sometimes zero. Sometimes 12, 15.

SF: Could you talk more about the materials you had?

LJ: I had oil paints. And I didn’t actually start working with the ball points in Rhode Island in prison. I started doing that in the 1990s when I was in prison in PA, ‘cause I could not get access to canvas paints.

SF: The paints were given at the ACI?

LJ: Yes, in the seventies, in the eighties. The jail then was quite different from what it is now. You were able to have access to greater things. I built some silkscreens there. I had all the chemicals I needed. Now, you’re not allowed to have anything flammable. I actually had X-Acto knives; the jail was quite different back then. They had like a woodworking shop, they were making furniture. One guy was making mirrors. I was doing silk screens, and I’d etch the glass on the mirrors that he was making.

SF: Did you just keep all of your art in your cell? I imagine that filled up the whole space.

LJ: Yeah, the cell was small. Everything was confined.

SF: Were you able to have any outside exhibitions while you were incarcerated?

LJ: I had an exhibition at RISD in the early eighties, and also at the Providence Public Library. The director of the Arts and Corrections program, Ms. Roberta Richmond, was connected with the Rhode Island Council of Arts and she made all that possible.

SF: Your art was labeled as “racial art” and seized at one point. Could you just talk about that and what it felt like to have your art surveilled?

LJ: Yeah, that is exactly how I see it, and that’s exactly what it is. They have to as a security matter keep you from, let’s say, ‘causing chaos’ in the prison, they have to pay close attention to what they hear people talking about and what they see people doing.

I’ve been told by many different correctional officers that my artwork was racist. And I don’t think that it is racist. If you see a person watch other people fight, that doesn’t make him violent, that simply makes him an observer of violence. And the artwork that I produce is not racist, it’s just a reflection of what I am seeing. The person who lives on a farm, who’s constantly exposed to nature, trees, birds, and meadows, that’s what he would paint. But being a person of color who is continually under attack for that color and just reporting on that does not make me racist. Actually, I don’t think that there is such a thing as a black race or a white race or a yellow race or a red race or any color you name. That’s not a race. The race is the human race.

SF: How many times was your art taken away? And how did you go about getting it back?

LJ: Every time something was confiscated, I managed to get it back. When I was locked up in PA was the first time something was confiscated from me, and it had to be in the early 2000s because one of the things that was complicated for me was a portrait of Osama bin Laden. And they didn’t like that. And another one was something that I called “Sista-Matized,” which is in there on the wall and also in the book.

SF: Yeah, I think I saw that one. Wait, they didn’t like the Bin Laden one, ‘cause, was it like supporting him or something? Or like, they just didn’t agree.

LJ: They just didn’t like it. There is no set standard that a correctional officer uses when they come into your cell to determine what is acceptable. They just go from however they feel—‘I don’t like this, so I’m going to take it.’ I had a guy come into my cell one time and I had a metal watch band. And this guy, he just said, ‘oh, this is mine.’ And he was going to take it, keep it. And I had to argue with him to get it back. But with the Bin Laden thing and the “Sista-Matized” in PA, I had to go to court. And the court made the Department of Corrections give me

“The Eagle Flies Everyday In My Part Of America” by Leonard Jefferson

Reprinted with permission of the artist.

“Sista-Matized” back. And they made them give me the Bin Laden drawing back, but they would not allow me to keep it in the prison, so I had to send it out.

SF: After that, did you have to purposely conceal things or deal with legibility in any way?

LJ: I just kept on doing what I felt like doing.

And then in RI in [2015], I was doing a drawing [of the July 2015 shooting of Samuel DuBose by police officer Ray Tensing], and that image was actually in the newspaper. And [the C.O.] told me, “That’s racist.” I said, “Racist?” Here it is in the newspaper. So he didn’t take it.

Then on October the 27th, they raided my cell [and I was placed in Solitary Confinement for the next 20 days]. They said that I was making drawings of correctional officers being assaulted by inmates, which once again, it was nothing like that.

And they said that the carbon paper that I had was contraband. But I bought that carbon paper from the commissary in the prison in PA. Now, when the sheriffs brought me to RI from PA, they laid everything that I had on the counter, and the correctional officer looked through it and sent me on my way with the carbon paper. They search everything that’s in your cell a couple times a week, so all the way from November of 2013 until October of 2015. Suddenly this carbon paper becomes contraband. So they give me a misconduct report and they immediately put me in segregation, or the hole, or whatever you want to call it.

SF: How does your experience being incarcerated affect your art now that you’re out of prison?

LJ: Well, I wouldn’t say that it has changed at all. ‘Cause I’m connected with organizations who do a lot of prison reform work. So I feel, in a way, imprisoned, because of the last thing I did. A lot of people who get over prison forget all about it, and put it behind them and act like it didn’t happen. And then when they go back to prison, they find out conditions have gotten worse ‘cause they didn’t take the time to advocate and change things to improve the conditions of prison.

If you wanna look at it from a selfish point of view, I understand that I could be re-imprisoned, literally at the drop of a hat. For nothing. Which is why I was in prison before—for nothing. Somebody happens not to like you, right? And they abuse that authority they have to imprison you. Just like the police are killing people literally at the drop of a hat for nothing. I mean, that’s the reality.

SF: What is it like to receive more recognition for your art recently?

LJ: It’s good because people are taking interest, more now than ever before, of what’s actually happening. You have what they’re calling the age of mass incarceration. Whereas in 1980 there were something like 300,000 prisoners in the entire United States of America, today there’s over 2 million.

People are understanding that the prisons have become a business, and it’s what it has always been. It’s for control over an unwanted population. And there’s a genocide actually going on because they’re taking these young guys and you’re giving them 20, 30 years in prison, and they’re in their baby-making prime, but they’re not making babies because they’re in prison. There’s also the demographics. America is a white-majority population country now, but that is due to change in something like 2035. It would’ve flipped over long before 2035 if they wouldn’t have started locking them guys up. And they’re locking the women up, too. Women are the fastest growing group of prisoners in the country.

But it’s good to get recognition and see that people are interested in what’s actually going on in prison. ‘Cause as long as they’re not interested, no change is going to be made.

SF: Do you see yourself working within ‘outsider

art’? Or more in the institutional art world? Or somewhere in between? How do you feel about your art being associated with ‘prison art’ versus existing outside of that category?

LJ: I think that art is art, period. The art that is produced in prison is just as valid as the art that is produced by people who have gone to school and got degrees. I haven’t been to any schools. Recently, since I’ve been out of prison, I’m sitting at the table and everybody there is a doctor, has a PhD, and I don’t have a bachelor’s training. It’s like, ‘Whoa, where am I at?’ In that way I feel like I’m an outsider. Because I haven’t gone to school for this.

It’s good to be able to deliver the message, to move up into people who are interested in making changes that need to be made to make the prison system more humane.

SF: Do you have a community of artists who are previously incarcerated?

LJ: It’s more kind of like I’m on my own. But I am a member of DARE which is an organization of people who have been in prison. You know, we deal with social issues.

SF: Yeah. Like Stop Torture RI.

LJ: Yeah, and Bail on 32 is another campaign we have going on.

See, I’m on probation, right. And say I got off the bus from work. But in between the bus stop and where we are now, there’s a bunch of guys and they’re drinking, they’re gambling, okay? So when I walk by there, the police roll up and they arrest everybody, including me. Everybody who’s out there is gonna be released after the police take them down to the station and book them, they’ll be released. But me, because I am a person who’s on probation, I won’t be released. I have to do a mandatory 10 days—which often turns to 30—in prison without bail, and I’m not allowed to get out from bail, so I’m gonna lose my job. And I haven’t done anything. I just walked by.

We’re trying to get that changed, so that when you get arrested you have to have actually done something that’s a violation of the conditions of your probation. That’s what Bail on 32 is about.

SF: What do you see as the role of art and prison abolition in reform?

LJ: Art plays a very important role. One of the things that we’re also working on in there is shutting down that maximum security building. It was built in the 1870s. It was antiquated, and in 1977 the U.S. District Court said that the building was unfit for human habitation, that it must be closed—it could no longer be used to house prisoners.

I was surprised to see that it was still open when they brought me back to Rhode Island. I was actually a litigant in the court suit in 1977 that brought about the decision that that building was to be closed. So at DARE now we are still focusing on trying to get them to close that building to build a new prison.

There’s an argument going on because the abolitionists don’t want them to build a new prison, but they want to continue housing people in conditions that are unfit for human habitation. The health and sanitation doesn’t meet the codes, right? Everything is substandard. There’s

mold everywhere. It’s freezing in one area and hot in another. No ventilation.

SF: I saw that some of your drawings depicted the black mold. It’s not like you can just take a picture from prison and post it, you know? So the art seems invaluable in that case.

LJ: Mm-hmm. I mean, you can see the black mold in there, you can smell it, you can taste it. You know, there are guys that are highly allergic to this stuff. So they refuse to lock in that cell. When I say lock in, I mean they wanna put all your property in and have you sleeping in that cell. And when they refuse to do that, they put them in Solitary.

SF: Are there times when art is not needed? When does the community need to show up physically versus through art?

LJ: I think that the art is always needed. Because art is one way to attract people, to get their attention and to educate the people about the problem that we’re trying to resolve. And when you go to the protest with the people you have the signs, which are speaking when you can’t speak. You can’t always be talking and being heard, but if you’ve got a sign, the sign is talking to the officials who you’re trying to reach.

SF: Sometimes people say, “Let’s give voice to these people through art,” rather than changing day-to-day realities. For example, putting art in museums can be a way of sterilizing it. How do you deal with the fact that people might just look at art and not actually change day-to-day realities?

LJ: It’s commonly said that those who are closer to the problem are best situated to cause change. So you take a guy, let’s say he’s a millionaire and he doesn’t have any social consciousness about himself at all, and he’s looking at someone who’s a poor person who’s in prison basically because of poverty and racism, right? Then he’s not gonna get the message and he’s not gonna communicate that message that was originally intended by the person who produced the work.

Some people don’t have the social consciousness that’s required to get involved, to try to improve situations. Other people do have that. So if art is put in a museum and it’s advertised properly so that it can attract the right people, if it’s put in its proper context and perspective about what it actually is and what it represents and what it is calling for, then that’s a good thing.

See Bulletin for ways to get involved in Stop Torture RI and DARE initiatives.

SARAPHINA FORMAN B/R’26 and Jefferson enjoyed listening to Charles Mingus on the rainy ride back from his studio.

“Iam D. Law” by Leonard Jefferson. Reprinted with permission of the artist.

“Hands in the Dirt”

It was 4:35 p.m. on a Sunday in late July, and Eric and I were perched atop our suitcases, sweating, on an unshaded corner in a small town near Seville. Hopefully the promised van would come around the corner, but all we could do now was to cross our fingers and wait.

Our plan was to go “WWOOFing”—the colloquial verb-ification of WWOOF, or World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming, the program that was (loosely) facilitating our summer adventure. If all went well, we would soon spend three weeks working on a vegetable farm here in La Puebla del Rio, offering our labor in exchange for room and board. We would wake up with the sun, tune up our Spanish, share stories with our hosts, learn the ins and outs of small-scale organic agriculture, swim under the shade of a lychee tree, and go days without spending a cent.

But more than that, we would be part of a project—a global experiment of sorts. Here was an exchange of labor, knowledge, space, and resources that was not, technically, a “job”; in fact, it seemed to be positioned squarely, and thrillingly, outside of the market. No money was changing hands here. No contracts were being signed. Holding then, as I do now, a strong skepticism toward the United States’ existing frameworks for labor and capital exchange, I was intrigued by the idea of something different, something separate, and something new.

But for now, we had to wait for our ride.

+++

WWOOF was founded in 1971 by Sue Coppard, a secretary in London with deeply romantic ideas about the value of nature and “the countryside.” Originally called “Working Weekends on Organic Farms,” Coppard conceptualized the new program as allowing “unskilled townies” to support the organic project, learn new skills, and come into contact with nature. Even as WWOOF has grown, these idyllic notions remain central to how the organization bills itself, both verbally and visually.

By March 2023, WWOOF had linked over 100,000 volunteers to 12,000 farms worldwide. According to the most recent data available, from 2010, WWOOFers are overwhelmingly young adults, with nearly three-quarters between the ages of 19 and 28. A still-significant portion are older. I’m focusing on the experiences of Brown students here, which is not to discount the broad range of people who participate in the program.

WWOOF is largely decentralized. Each of WWOOF’s dozens of member countries maintains their own website, which provides a platform for basic research and initial communication between volunteer and host. Beyond that, the process of planning and negotiating a WWOOF stay is largely left to the participants themselves. The hands-off nature of the program and the unpolished, early-Internet look of many of the countries’ websites adds to WWOOF’s gritty, exciting, almost radical feel. But what stories actually emerge from this quasi-anarchic smorgasbord of photos and phone numbers and plane tickets and farm stays?

I talked to six Brown students who’d been WWOOFers in the past. Their recountings helped me interrogate the ways that WWOOF, in its current form, falls short of its utopian, anti-capitalist potential. Escape, it seems, is not so easy.

+++

You might know WWOOFing as I know it: a fun, relatively cheap way to spend a school break; an out-of-the-box experience with both educational and practical merit. Janek Schaller spent several months WWOOFing in Austria and Italy in 2020. To him, it was a chance to “engage more practically and tangibly with the stuff that I had been thinking about and learning about in classes on campus.” Olivia, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, WWOOFed in California during the fall of 2021. She spoke about wanting “to do something in real life, and not sitting on a computer in my apartment when everyone seemed to be doing that.”

These are common, and legitimate, goals. But to other WWOOFers, the program means something more. For those who are struggling to find housing, the program can offer food and shelter. This was true for Rose, who WWOOFed one spring break when her school’s dorms were closed and it was too costly to return home to Hong Kong.

Two interviewees told me, secondhand, about WWOOFers using the program to escape unsafe or uncomfortable situations at home. Kate Cobey WWOOFed at what she called a “lesbian farm” in southern New Jersey in 2021, and said she “[got] the sense that … to some extent, it had been used as a queer network of support for people who are looking for a place.” Even for those not directly facing housing instability, WWOOF is a potential source of support and community for queer folks. Maddie told me that they “didn’t have a lot of trans and nonbinary community” growing up, and “wanted to have a space to build that” during their WWOOF stay in the winter of 2022.

The WWOOF program can be essential for farmers, too. In both the U.S. and Europe, agricultural consolidation, inflation, and climate change all threaten the economic viability of small-scale farming. At this point, explains food and agriculture writer Sarah Mock in an article for The Counter, “to build a successful small family farm, you have to prioritize profit above all.”

In Europe, Brexit was an added shock to agricultural markets, while the COVID pandemic has had a disruptive effect worldwide. There’s an additional problem of generational replacement: farmers of the last generation are getting older, and their children have been slow to take up the mantle. The situation in Europe is just as dire, where the number of farms decreased by 37 percent from 2005 to 2020.

Amidst this predicament, WWOOF is a potential saving grace: a source of mostly young, extremely low-cost labor that many farms desperately need. +++

There are all the hopes. But what about the reality?

First, and maybe most straightforwardly, WWOOF has issues with access. In order to go WWOOFing, you need (at least) consistent internet access, in order to find and communicate with farms; you also need to come up with a small annual fee for membership to each country’s WWOOFing network.

WWOOFers aren’t able to make or save up money as they work, since WWOOF labor is compensated solely with room and board. Again, this puts the program out of reach to many young people who need to spend their summers or gap years earning an income. The same issue applies for adults, for whom WWOOF might be a temporary way to stay afloat while jobless—but doesn’t afford the opportunity for economic advancement or longterm stability.

For those who are able to WWOOF, there remains a complex and fundamental tension between who stands to gain the most from the labor exchange and who actually does. Cobey, who WWOOFed in New Jersey, mentioned that farms with more resources might be better able to serve as places for community-building. More WWOOFers might yield a stronger or broader community, but “what kind of resources do you have to be able to afford that?” The cost of hosting multiple WWOOFers—providing them with housing and buying them food—is, while not as much of a financial burden as paying hired workers a living wage, often greater in monetary terms than what each volunteer brings in with their labor directly. For this reason, already well-established farms with wealthy owners are best-positioned to take in and take care of their WWOOFers.

Olivia, in her time WWOOFing in California, saw the flipside: farms that were stretched thin, and therefore struggled to provide the kind of support that she and her companions needed. At her first destination, a date farm in the Mojave desert, one of the other WWOOFers threatened violence toward a member of Olivia’s group. The hosts responded by asking her group to leave the farm. We were “not the best workers in the world… we [were] twenty-year-olds who [had] never done this before,” said Olivia. “They didn’t have the capacity to be, quote, ‘babysitters,”... [they were] running a business in the middle of COVID [and couldn’t] mediate this conflict in a way that was the most fair.”

After being asked to leave the first farm, Olivia and her group were taken in by a second family that was facing even greater challenges. Their vegetable-growing operation was so new that housing for WWOOFers was still under

World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming and the pitfalls of informal labor exchange

construction when the group arrived; she and her three companions stayed in a single-room garage with one bed. After a week, Olivia reported, the group was again asked to leave. “The owner made a little speech to us as he was kicking us out that we did ‘shit work,’” she said. “And he said, ‘I could hire migrant laborers, who are hungry and have seven hungry children, and they would do this work in half the time.’” It was clear to Olivia that the host was unwilling to pay more than the bare minimum for work— drawing on a long history of exploitative labor practices in U.S. agriculture.

There are families for whom farming and hosting WWOOFers is “a little pet project,” says Olivia. Although these farms have the time and resources to invest in education, community building, and cultural exchange, they don’t stand to benefit from WWOOF in the same tangible ways as poor, strug gling farms do. But this benefit comes from the farms’ absolute reliance on unpaid labor for their livelihood—which lends itself, at worst, but not infrequently, to exploitation.

+++

When working conditions are ripe for mistreatment or abuse, the brunt of this treatment is not often equally borne. Again, WWOOFers who need the program the most—because they lack housing, money, or community support—are exactly those who are most vulnerable to potential harm.

Vulnerability in WWOOFing comes from all sides, and was acknowledged by every WWOOFer that I interviewed. “You have to be really trusting to be a WWOOFer, I think, or at least very cautious,” said Maddie. “It is a labor exchange… but doesn’t have a contract [or] national labor protections associated with it. Like any kind of informal work that you’re not under contract for, I think this can get really sketchy really fast.”

WWOOFing requires you to count on strangers for your most basic needs—housing, food, and occasionally medical treatment. In some cases, WWOOFers also rely on their hosts for transport to and from the farm. For Cobey, “trying to leave those positions is always scary. There’s a clear imbalance of power, and you’re relying on faith entirely.”

There is also rarely any predicting or accounting for the people you might be working for, or with. Maddie, Cobey, and Simone all spoke about wanting to avoid host families who might be intolerant of their gender or sexual identities. Cobey specified: “As an LGBTQ individual, it was really important to me that I [didn’t] end up on a farm with people who are homophobic.”

Cobey was wary of the living situations that WWOOFers sometimes encounter, noting that one of her fellow female WWOOFers had to share a bunk bed with an older male volunteer. “The idea of being somewhere where I can’t lock someone out, especially if that someone is an older man, immediately gives me the heebie jeebies,” she said. She contextualized this feeling within the larger experience of “traveling anywhere as a female-bodied person,” with all the worry, risk, and discomfort that it entails.

These risks are the most profound for WWOOFers facing instability in food, housing, safety, or community outside of the program. While neither Schaller nor Cobey were in this position, one can imagine being forced to stay in a problematic setup for lack of a viable alternative—or struggling immensely if or when, like Olivia’s group, they are unexpectedly asked to leave.

In a labor relationship based on interpersonal trust, the only shields available when that trust is broken are pre-existing privileges.

In Olivia’s case, she acknowledged, there were “a number of safety nets that allowed me to be fine when things went south.” One of the members of her group had a van, equipped with a mattress and other gear, that allowed the four WWOOFers to depart the first farm immediately once they felt unsafe. Olivia had money to pay for gas and food, and two of her companions knew people at the Claremont Colleges who agreed to take them in for several days.

Safety nets can be financial and social; they can also correspond to one’s racial and gender identity. Schaller, who WWOOFed in Austria and Italy, acknowledged that “the identities that I hold [as a cisgendered white man] made it a lot easier for me to travel on my own throughout Europe.” But what about the others—those without the same confidence, connections, or credit cards?

+++

To fully understand this problem, we need to step back and consider the broader labor system under which WWOOF falls. The agricultural labor force in both the U.S. and Europe is dominated by migrant workers—in the U.S., 86 percent of farm workers are foreign-born, and 45 percent are undocumented. Migrants without papers often are not included in, or cannot take advantage of, legal protections against exploitation and abuse. In Italy, where Schaller worked as a WWOOFer, a high proportion of migrant laborers find work through the illegal and inherently exploitative caporalato system, in which they are often underpaid, live and work under extremely poor conditions, and are vulnerable to physical, sexual, and psychological violence. But exploitation is endemic in agricultur al systems throughout the EU, as it is in the U.S., too.

When the owner of Olivia’s first farm compared the WWOOFers to “hungry” migrant laborers “who would work in half the time,” he showed an inability, or an unwillingness, to think beyond existing exploitative structures for agricultural work in his conception and use of the WWOOF program. The WWOOF organization, too, lacks the self-awareness about its role in this broad er system that it would need to address and ameliorate that system’s violence. Take Coppard, WWOOF’s founder. In an early article she wrote about the program, the subtitle she thought most appropriate was “Rent-a-Serf.”

WWOOF is a relatively young organi zation, and I’m hopeful that it’s capable of change. Some fixes are straightforward. When I asked the WWOOFers I spoke to what they thought the program could do better, multiple people emphasized the importance of communi cation with their hosts. Simone suggested that WWOOF should, among other things, offer a set of questions that both host and volunteer were required to answer before starting a visit. For example: “If I decide that I want to leave, will you be okay with that?” Of course this solution is incomplete; stated commitments can only do so much when there are no structures in place to ensure that hosts follow through. WWOOF could do much more to establish for everyone some of the safeguards against vulnerability and abuse that volunteers, for now, must sporadically create for themselves (if they can). And it should make a particular emphasis on protections for queer people, low-income people, and people of color, who stand to gain the most from WWOOF.

But all this aside, for WWOOF to truly be able to protect and support its participants, it

needs to recognize its place within the broader labor market. Many, if not most, WWOOF farms also employ paid laborers in some capacity. Is it possible to recognize certain advantages of this setup without capitulating to typical, tired structures of labor exchange? Full-time workers sometimes do benefit from protections and defined contracts. This can make their positions in some ways more stable than the volunteers’. Olivia said, of the paid workers on her first farm: “it was clear that they had built these relationships; that they felt secure in these jobs… they could have left; they also could have stayed.”

But within a broader context of exploitation and lack of regulation in the agricultural labor market, this experience of paid farm work is almost certainly not the norm. The greatest improvements to the WWOOF program might actually come from outside it—in the form of radical changes in the way that our agricultural economy is structured and regulated, and in the treatment of the people on whom its labor relies. As long as WWOOF is situated within a system as violent as the one we have now, it can’t truly operate as a space of safety or support.

And as long as WWOOF is part of such a system, it feels short-sighted to concentrate on limited program reforms. The fundamental problem here is not WWOOF; it’s the broader labor economy from which it tries, and fails, to offer an escape. +++

At 4:48 p.m. in La Puebla, we saw a dusty blue van come around the bend. Tatiana, our host, rolled down the window with a greeting. Eric and I looked at each other. It seemed like a miracle: that she was really here; that there was a car for us, and a spacious, thatched-roof hut down the road, and a fridge filled with fresh tomatoes and three weird varieties of eggplant and blocks of mozzarella cheese.

For nearly three weeks it stayed miraculous. The two of us worked, but not too hard; we ate abundantly, and one of the other WWOOFers introduced us to her favorite German pop songs. In the evenings, from the highest point in the sunflower patch, you could just barely see the rooftops in the Sometime during the second week, I asked Tatiana about her house—a gorgeous behemoth of yellow-and-bluepainted concrete. She told me that it dated from the 11th century; the whole property had been a Moorish oil mill. I realized suddenly that the house, and the property, must be worth at least a million dollars. What we were bringing in in weekly vegetable deliveries could be little more than a few hundred. This was plainly a family of significant means, for whom the farm had come out of passion, rather than necessity. And here we were, Eric and I; two teenagers with credit cards and American passports, perfectly positioned to enjoy our ‘escape’ from a market that had helped us far more than it had hurt. Better said, we had never left at all.

LILY SELTZ B’25 is munching on a carrot.

Iwas fortunate enough to be introduced to meditation in a cold, silent room at a local Kadampa temple, where behind my softspoken, robed, bald instructor, a multitude of gold figures—Buddhas from all throughout the Vedic tradition—stared back at me with painted eyes. My father sat next to me, his long body towering over my 10-year-old self; we stayed frozen, with crossed legs, hands placed in lap one atop the other, opposing thumbs connected, for what felt like hours to my wandering mind.

My father has practiced Buddhism on and off since he was in college, where he had discovered the late end of Buddhist spiritualism’s introduction to the American counterculture, popularized by writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as spiritual musicians like John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Herbie Hancock. As he bounced between cities and jobs, my father tended to seek out whichever Buddhist organization happened to be closest to him— he wasn’t always consistent in his practice, but he seemed to always, eventually, fall back into place at a temple. And since my early introduction to this ancient practice, I haven’t frequented a Buddhist institution or immersed myself in Buddhist literature with any sort of consistency, yet the guidance I have received from soft-spoken monks and spiritual readings remains planted in my mind, helping me make sense of my world.

While I first encountered meditation in an intimate, spiritual space, millions of Americans are introduced to meditation and mindfulness practices in secular, corporate, for-profit locations; meditation is now reportedly a $1.8 billion industry as companies like Amazon (with a repulsively named AmaZen program), Google, and Goldman Sachs invest in efficiency-boosting programs that train their employees to endure workplace exhaustion and stress through meditation. Similarly, massively valuable, neatly-designed apps like Headspace dominate social media advertising space, turning an Instagram feed into an unceasing spew of self-help promises. Headspace claims that you can “feel 14 percent less stressed in just 10 days” and commands you to “do it for yourself, and everyone you love.” A cursory Google search for “mindfulness products” returns thousands of overpriced items promising to help you “find your zen.” The American bourgeois existence is stuffed with faux-Buddhist, plastic spirituality, twisting the ancient religion into a trendy commodity to be sold alongside sets of yoga pants, diet plans, and self-help books.

The earliest records of meditation date back to around 1500 BCE at the beginnings of Vedic— pre-Hindu—schools in India. Yet the practice is most commonly associated and plays the biggest religious role in Buddhism, founded in the 6th century BCE by Siddartha Guatama (known most commonly as Buddha Shakyamuni) as Vedic religion developed into Hinduism, from which Jainism and Buddhism were born. Mindfulness and meditation are key components of the Buddhist journey to enlightenment—this religion cannot exist without these pieces.

The Eightfold Path, the most common summary of the Buddha’s teachings, offers eight elements that one must master simultaneously

to free oneself from the cycle of suffering (samsara) and reach enlightenment (nirvana); among these eight are Right Effort, Right Mindfulness (sati), and Right Concentration (samadhi), all three of which are exercised by meditation. Each of the eight divisions of the Path interact with and are essential to the mastery of one another: Right Mindfulness reinforces Right Speech which in turn reinforces Right Conduct and so on. Buddhist texts are adamant that each of these skills are necessary for enlightenment and that each skill is necessary for the perfection of the others. With meditation seen as the key to training the mind to think, speak, and act rightly, and with this righteous lifestyle seen as necessary to gaining the wisdom and resolve to continue on the strenuous path to enlightenment, Buddhism cannot exist without meditative practices; they are woven through each fiber of the ancient religion.

Gen Kelsang Menla is the Resident Teacher of Texas’s Kadampa Center and a wonderful guide for my family. Most weeks, my father attends Menla’s lessons, often staying behind to ask for advice. The conversations are casual and grounding. Each time I sit down with Menla, I am surprised I’m talking to a religious leader; he speaks like an ordinary, well-educated man, albeit one wearing robes and with a shaved head. This time is no different, when I meet with him over Zoom in an interview for the College Hill Independent. He tells me, over his lunch, that meditation “enables us to release our minds from bonds of delusion, attachment, and anger.” There’s a difference between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati); the purpose of the practice should not be for “worldly kinds of goods,” i.e. efficiency, productivity, or any sort of material profit. He labels meditation for those pursuits as “self-indulgent.” Menla says that he sees positive intention in the recent spread of meditative practices and that he’s glad that these beneficial techniques have been made more accessible, yet, for him, meditation devoid of its spiritual context is “taking one small benefit when the whole practice can bring you so much more.”

But this divorcing of mindfulness from its religious and moral context is unsurprising in a corporate setting. Americans are more stressed, and working more hours, than ever—we need any

coping mechanism we can get our hands on. And corporations are unlikely to deliver Buddhist practices in their spiritual contexts, which would likely emphasize a work-life balance, a reduction in materialism, and an increased focus on ethical consumption and action. So in the midst of workplace stress, employees are taught to distance themselves from their anxious lives through the use of meditation. The trainings are often successful, as seen in the raving reviews (Google’s director of executive development Richard Fernandez reported having “less reactivity in high-stress meetings”) and long waitlists for Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, a training program designed to improve workers’ leadership skills and emotional intelligence (EI) through mindfulness exercises. The program has received a rating of about 4.75 out of 5 from anonymous employee surveys. So companies can have more efficient, less stressed employees without making any structural changes to better workplace environments. Chade-Meng Tan, the founder of this groundbreaking program, comes from a Buddhist background and considers himself a sometime follower of the religion. While the program is secular—Meng has stated that he isn’t interested “in bringing Buddhism to Google”—it draws on Buddhist lessons: Meng tends to reference teachings by monks like Matthieu Ricard,

a Tibetan Buddhist who hails from France and has been called “the happiest man in the world.” The New York Times, when the Google program first began, celebrated reports of employees who, after taking the course, proudly shoulder increasingly copious amounts of work, while Forbes, in an article praising Search Inside Yourself, even went on to summarize the program’s teachings as instructing employees to “take a deep breath when your job sucks.”

The purpose of the program is to transform Buddhist spiritual practices into corporate qualifications.

In an interview with WIRED, Meng stated, “Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career, and every company knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of money.”

While it’s hard to find any empirical data, these applauding anecdotes can be found from employees at other prominent companies like Goldman Sachs and Intel. But while this “lessened reactivity” and greater “emotional intelligence” may be beneficial for many employees in a stressful workplace, I doubt that taking a deep breath is an effective, long-term solution. When employers offer this patronizing yet trendy nonsolution, the burden of staying sane at work falls to the workers; companies can avoid their duties to make structural changes that would create a healthier workplace.

And it isn’t as if this corporate borrowing gets approved by any Buddhist authority. “Buddhism exists through the form of various lineages from master to master, the teachings have been passed down,” Menla tells me. “To take these extraordinary practices out of the context of these lineages can really be seen as appropriation.” Throughout our discussion, Menla consistently referred to workplace mindfulness as a form of corporate appropriation or exploitation. The religion tends to focus on a teacher’s passing down of their own interpretations of Buddhist principles to their students through personal connection. Whether it is corporate training programs disseminating these practices to their employees or entrepreneurs looking to design a product, spreading these practices without paying homage to or asking for the consent of these teachers commodifies religion and stings with disrespect. He tells me that the founder of Headspace, Andy Puddicombe, got the idea for the app while studying at a Buddhist monastery in India and probably received no permission to use his learning in the making of a for-profit enterprise. In fact, Menla mentions that it is common practice in Buddhist communities for ordained monks to sign legal agreements stating that they won’t use their teachings for self-promotion or any material personal gain. Doing so, he says, would be “stealing something” in a moral sense from the long genealogies of teaching.

Buddhism, however, is still a religion that prides itself on its ability to adapt to differing cultural landscapes, first spreading through Eastern Asia in ancient times and in subsequent eras throughout the West. Practices vary across these cultures: Zen traditions are wildly different from those practiced by the several Tibetan sects. One need only look at Buddhism’s interaction

and compatibility with Japanese Shintoism to see that Buddhism thrives as it adapts to new cultures: Buddhism was introduced to the island in the 6th century; it’s common throughout Japanese spiritual communities for individuals and temples to practice both religions simultaneously in a common syncretism known as shinbutsu-shūgō which has been practiced since the 18th century. But in today’s for-profit America, Buddhist practices are contorted to serve as a means to an end, a situation that is fundamentally antithetical to the aims of this religion that relies on the pursuit of non-worldly goals and rejects materially enriching actions. Any commodification of this 2,600-year-old practice perverts the teachings of the practice as well as the countless generations of teachers who have kept Buddhism alive.

The prominent Thervadist monk, Bhikku Bodhi, reminds us that “mindfulness can help us to gain greater clarity in fulfilling our responsibility to transform the social order in alignment with our ethical standards.” As it has done throughout its long history, Buddhism can act as a tool of personal and societal growth in our modern day, especially as American monks like Bodhi increasingly teach Buddhism in relation to activism, a practice of Engaged Buddhism that first originated in Vietnam in the 20th century before spreading to India and eventually the U.S. Buddhism, with its ability to adapt, can make a positive impact on an American cultural ethos, but only if it is handled with respect and care in authentically spiritual communities.

How can we engage with Buddhism in a respectful way? Buddhism is a universalizing religion—it is meant to spread throughout communities and localities. Universalizing religions, with their wide spread, inevitably evolve

as they encounter peoples with differing interpretations and needs. This is visible in the American context. Much of the initial spread of Buddhism in the U.S. originated from the immigration of East Asian populations to the West Coast between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Naturally, some change is expected, but what exists in the corporate setting goes further than adaptation. The extractive element of meditation in America comes from the for-profit uses of Buddhist practices that, like yoga, have been divorced from their spiritual roots and made into a trendy image of crossed legs and tight pants. There aren’t clear-cut answers here. It would be ideal if Americans interested in mindfulness practices or meditation could explore them in the spiritual contexts that they arise from, but these Buddhist communities, led by learned monks, are scarcer outside of America’s larger urban areas. Apps like Headspace that commercialize meditation are disrespectful to Buddhist tradition but are much more accessible to the population without the time, information, and location necessary to enter a Buddhist space. And these apps and programs do seem to help many deal with stress and won’t be going away anytime soon; Headspace has 70 million downloads and 600,000 (almost all positive) reviews. They exist as a teleological good—albeit, a minor good in comparison to the actual spirituality of Buddhism—with a morally dubious root.

It’s clear that corporations should not be utilizing these practices for profit and that doing so is extractive and serves an expressly anti-Buddhist purpose. But what about the company employee looking to destress after an hours-intensive week? What about the consumer who wants to use Headspace to better their mental health? Is what they’re doing also extractive? Or is there a way to reconcile personal needs with these systemic implications?

It’s frightening to think that Buddhist practices are increasingly stripped of their context while being used in corporate settings to reinforce the status quo. I worry that they might go the way of yoga or tantric exercises, two deeply spiritual Asian practices reduced to bland, ‘self-indulgent’ workout and sex fads in America. When I chat with Menla, he jokes about what those two practices have become here; he’s cheerful about this whole subject—such is often the way of Buddhist monks.

Maybe this consumerist phenomenon is a starting point for a large section of the American population to eventually engage with Buddhism in a more meaningful, truthful way. Belief systems aren’t static as they move across time and throughout different communities. Buddhism and its practices will continue to evolve in the U.S. I only hope that this ancient practice is able to flourish in a mindful way.

BETO BEVERIDGE B’25 is taking a deep breath.

THE YOGURT.

It’s Dannon. You know, Dan-non, like in the jingle, from those old television commercials we used to watch on cable. DAN-non. You hear it? I bought it from Safeway an hour ago and haven’t refrigerated it yet, though I stashed everything else—the strawberries, the honeycrisp apples, the red onions, the string cheese, and the eggplant. But the yogurt I’m keeping warm. I want those martyring, empathic probiotics energetic and ready for what comes next. I want them awake.

My old high school English teacher, Mrs. Daly, retired a couple of months ago. I heard from her cousin that she was planning to exercise her savings on a tiny house in the mountains, and in the backyard build a giant composting bin from scratch, piling orange peels on eggshells on worms. This composting bin would be so generative and self-sufficient, supposedly, that when she kicked the bucket, her young, and able-bodied husband could load her rigor mortis-ed corpse into the bin, then fertilize the garden. Very interesting because I always thought her problem was more related to her profuse hatred for children than some (clearly unstable) desire to return to the earth. In private she likened our adolescent attempts to disassemble classical texts for their implicit messaging to monkeys throwing their shit at walls. But surely our failings were her fault? Her cousin, who so graciously accepted my friend request made on Facebook under the guise of being Mrs. Daly’s realtor for the tiny house—I was thinking about high school and wanted to check in on her—I mean, body compost? What crept into her head?—told me she got the bin idea from this documentary she watched—and then I knew I had to get my hands on it, break it open.

In the documentary, the filmmaker and subject was recovering from second impact syndrome, which is when you get another concussion when presently suffering from an initial concussion. His little gray brain swelled like a balloon, and like a guy blowing way too hard into the mouth of that balloon, so all its rubber corners crushed straight into the skull, he got a deadly headache. So he fell into a devastating, frankly unavoidable depression, and in order to survive the interior ravages, had to take a step back from everything he had ever known. No more Hollywood glamor, only hermitude. No more car, only bike. No more sewage system, no more waste as a concept, everything repurposed, urine back to water. Local produce or starvation. It took some time but he felt better. And I could in a sense see where Mrs. Daly was coming from. As I watched this subject/sufferer prepare himself for each day, slipping delicately into his water shoes, shrugging into his singular and sweat-wicking shirt, gumming down his vegan gruel, I began to believe in the routine. I saw how his life diminished item by item until he was just a person again, or something less. I walked from my bedroom to my bathroom to my kitchen.

Then into the mudroom. A life of asceticism was my next step, too.

The concusionee/ascetic fermented his own yogurt. He loaded goat milk into a great steel pot and followed the ancient recipe—keeping the secretions of the goat at a middling temperature for the better part of a day so that the various strains of “good bacteria” could comfortably incubate. It seems like he favored Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Bifidobacerium lactis, though I’m rather partial to the Streptoccocus thermophilus The others are cylindrical, pill-shaped and interlockable, but the thermophilus is rounder, insect eggs or intestines, slippery and they disperse. I hypothesize that thermophilus will slide so smoothly between my fingers.

Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, this much I’ve gathered. But still I can’t help imagining the grainy photograph, sepia Bell thrusting that Ghostbusters favorite into open air, seeking the paranormal. I suppose I imagine the invention of every noteworthy electronic device happening in his hands, those thick grubby fingers piecing together the future. I think about Graham Bell a lot. I think of him every time I pick up my phone. Every time it buzzes. Lately I have begun to feel a buzzing all over my body. I keep my phone’s ringer on silent as is customary. And I am attuned to its signals. I plant it in my breast pocket or my pants pocket or my jacket pocket, and I pay particular attention to that spot, waiting for the notification. But the vibrations have spread in the past couple of weeks; I feel it near my breast pocket when my phone is in my jeans, in my jeans when my phone is in my breast pocket, on my person when there is no buzz at all. So maybe the universe is sending me secret signs, and maybe the buzzing comes from elsewhere.

I learned rhetorical analysis from Mrs. Daly, but it does not go far enough. I cannot keep crafting arguments through implicit rather than explicit signs. Things should be laid bare, and I should understand instantaneously, which would mean that we were connected, thermophilus and I. I also read Hamlet in Mrs. Daly’s class, and that was significantly more useful. I do see myself in Ophelia, which surprises most people. But I understand her, I do, in the way that she stood by and saw everything and knew things were going bad but couldn’t figure why, the decomposition of events, couldn’t move past the coated window, couldn’t do anything, except go to the river, beg to sink herself. And the way her hair spread out across the rippling surface, the water gelatinous, refusing to let her sink. Maybe I need to cite the Millais painting here. How her image was born from a yearning for the natural. And the moxie of the natural, to only admit the deserving. The thick unforgiving water is what I think of when I make eye contact again with the Dannon yogurt. It stares back placidly. What is it trying to say?

The fact of the matter is that my Amazon package has been delayed by (they guess) two

days. So my EMF meter is nowhere in sight, and this yogurt which I should “Keep Refrigerated” has been sitting out all day. But that’s okay. The documentary and I, we’re at odds. In the documentary, the moment is one of revelation, the end to a long journey of self-improvement and earth-return. The docu

reader goes way up. He pulls his hand back, and the reader ticks down. “See?” he says. “The yogurt, man. It senses our presence. The yogurt knows we’re here. It knows.” He gestures at the camera, at himself, at the yogurt. “We’re all connected.”

The buzzing in my fingers has started again. Damn Graham Bell relic, I put it into the

refrigerator. I need all my focus for this task, need to close my eyes and visualize. The gelatin river giving way as the yogurt reaches out its energetic tendrils. But the buzzing stops, wavers. Maybe I’m imagining it. I’ve already peeled the cover off the yogurt cup, what more contact does it need? I dip my fingers in? I swirl them around, bring them to my mouth? Mixed berry? Maybe the digestion is bad, maybe that subjugates the probiotics to my own re-composition. Dip again, this time I press my fingers to my face. I smudge a line across my upper lip, just beneath my nostrils. Another across my eyelids, two more in the whorled shells of my ears. More buzzing! What is it trying to tell me? Let’s see. If I travel up the river—

There’s a level of porosity I think I’m not achieving. I was weighing the various ways I could better prepare myself for this experience before I set off, how to most suitably open my mind. Psychedelics were an option, or meditation. A concussion, even. I needed to shake up the brain, force it to de-language. Through some quiet, positive manipulation, I found my new Facebook friend coughing up the address of the tiny house.

I almost ran out of gas. At one point my wheel jagged in a rut in the road, and a nice mountain man who probably took my orientation to be something other than it is helped me to push it out. Finally I made it, key under doormat like cousin promised. The house was tinier than I expected. The same size as the composting bin almost, so when I stood before the bin, I could not see the house which stood right behind it. I put on her young husband’s water shoes (three sizes too big), walked from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen, in approximately ten steps, and looked to the garden. And its steep slope. Found a handful of worms in the prevaricating earth, reached an arm into the composting bin and felt the steam radiate upwards to envelop me. This all would have been better if I had psilocybin on my person, but my Amazon package was delayed. I brought the Dannon outside and considered the earth. I considered the river.

Is there a way to pass through the surface? My arm is moving without any prompting from me. My father once told me that to be living is to be able to move of your own volition. Us and all living beings, the worms my sisters. We slither along the base between apple skins. That’s

Then he switched to a cell phone factory, and things moved sometimes.

The yogurt on my face is so dry it’s beginning to crack. No thanks to the mountain wind which draws moisture away. I turn facedown in the river for relief. It’s clear to me now that this piece of real estate is fundamentally inhospitable, cold and empty, and I almost want to turn back. I could draw my phone from the fridge and dial Mrs. Daly. I could apologize for tricking her cousin. I could say, “I’m on my knees, Mrs. Daly. I’m knee-deep.”

But there she is, Ophelia, she finds my hand and sticks to it. I find I’m wishing for the mountain man and his large shoes. But “your options are fast dissipating,” she says. “What,” I say.

“Is it all here?” she says.

“No, my Amazon package was delayed.” We’re burbling.

“No. The logos, pathos, and ethos.”

“What?”

“The purpose, medium, and context.”

I can’t pull my hand away.

“Audience.”

Mrs. Daly once gave me a 75 on a Shakespeare paper.

“You’re prevaricating.”

“I am not.”

“This is a call to action.”

“This is a call to value.”

“This is a marketing scheme.”

“This is a Socratic seminar.”

“What is a call to action?”

“A protest against structures?”

“What structures?”

“Societal structures?”

“That which connects us?”

“That which is modeled after the human body?”

Alexander drifts past us going down, but I can’t read his face. I think he’s muttering, “We’re all connected! We must continue to move, and the phones keep us connected—” as his mouth lingers at my ear, his breath soft, grazing my shoulder. But I can’t be sure what he says, if it’s something more like “I did invent the EMF meter. I am a purveyor of the paranormal.” I can’t be sure. I’m full of yogurt. Yogurt fills the gaps in my water shoes. Yogurt walks a mile in my water shoes. It buzzes, leads me to the mouth of the river and the riverbed, the appleskins.

I think—and I’m thinking—that there are things in this water besides us. They’re moving through me, sisters and smaller things. I’m tipping over, I tip in. Is that you, thermophilus? Finally I eat something and it is decomposed.

hi there. im mrs daly’s realtor. my phones been wiped due to a storage problem. cannot get in contact with her but could you confirm the terms of sale for me? please send the contract again immediately.

Then Mrs. Daly and her young husband went for a day trip down the mountain in search of Lactobacillus bulgaricus. The drive up was tough.

what I tell myself. My arm lifts me up, drags me to the lip. My knees would swing but they’re stiff. Ophelia’s already down there in the water, floating but gathering sufficient momentum. What’s that, is she singing, is she reaching for me? Is that the origin of the vibrations? My young father once worked a job in seafood packing, so he saw a lot of living things moving.

JANE WANG B’24 now gets the chills when she sees worms / has begun to feel a buzzing all over her body / mourns the discontinued Dannon cereal yogurt.

FREIGHT RAIL, OFF TRACK

On February 3, 50 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. The trains burned for more than 48 hours, during which residents within a two-mile radius of the accident site were evacuated by first responders. On February 6, an hours-long controlled burn of five cars—typically a hazard reduction measure—released 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride gas, one of several known carcinogens released in the crash, into the atmosphere. Though water and air samples taken by the EPA on February 7 were deemed safe enough for residents to return, residents continue to experience health effects, including rashes, coughing, vomiting, dizziness, and headaches, and scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon have found chemical compounds at a higher concentration than the government had reported.

The conditions that produced this disaster are far from unique. Excluding subway systems, the U.S. rail industry comprises passenger rail and overwhelmingly freight rail. Freight rail carries around 4.5 million tons of toxic chemicals each year. Government agencies have reported that an estimated 12,000 rail cars like these pass through U.S. cities and towns each day and that 54,539 train derailments have occurred between 1990 and 2021, averaging 1,704 per year. The College Hill Independent counts at least 14 other reports of freight rail derailments across the country since East Palestine. Three have included the spill of hazardous materials. In the words of Glenn Olcerst, the founder of Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh, to the Indy, “This is a Norfolk nightmare coming soon to a neighborhood near you.”

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has since called upon carriers across the freight industry to cooperate with initiatives

from Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to improve safety and accountability. What these calls for increased regulation overlook is that the volume of rail accidents we see today is also the result of a far longer history of negligence. These practices include running longer and less weight-balanced trains; reducing personnel on board and in rail yards, including for freight trains with only a single crew member on board; and implementing precision scheduled railroading, which leaves car men only 90 seconds to complete each rail car’s safety inspection. All of these industry standards have allowed freight rail companies to chip away at labor rights and implement aggressive cost cuts.

Downsizing in particular has increased the risk of derailment. Rail companies laid off more than 20,000 workers in 2018-2019 alone— the largest layoffs since the Great Recession. Post-pandemic hiring has far from kept pace, and training processes that used to take years have now been shortened to six months.

In this system where labor rights, effective maintenance, and regulatory efforts can be tossed aside in the name of profit, derailments have transformed from events that should be minimized to inevitabilities. Rather than trying to decrease their numbers, companies like Norfolk Southern now ‘plan’ for derailments and the resultant payouts to local communities. East Palestine has already been promised a $5.6 million financial commitment, a $300,000 “donation” to the school district, an $875,000 “reimbursement” to local firefighters, and a $1,000 “inconvenience check” to all residents.

Many future-oriented policy projects, including President Biden’s policy agendas, have emphasized the need for sustainable rail infrastructures to chart a course toward climate and economic resilience. Transitioning from fossil fuel-powered rail to electric rail would significantly reduce carbon emissions, for example, and would be critical to transporting the infrastructure materials necessary for climate-resilient construction. But our current freight rail

systems are far from equipped to handle this. If freight rail demand doubles by 2045, as projected by the DOT, our current systems instead chart a course toward continuous disaster.

Despite an expressed commitment to rail from the federal government last November, Congress forced a contract between major freight carriers and unionized employees that gave most freight rail workers what amounts to a pay cut during a time of record profits and discussions of mergers between some of the largest freight companies in North America. This move will only exacerbate pressure on an industry under immense strain and reinforce profit incentives that allow for such chaos to continue. +++

Threading through the expanses of the United States, railroads are this country’s vascular network. Through wide-open and urban spaces alike, freight cars transport the raw materials, industrial products, and merchandise that allow business to continue as usual. The railroads affect everyone, most tangibly those working in and living alongside them. But those at the industry’s extremities—the railway company leaders, their shareholders, and their lobbyists—make the critical decisions about how freight courses through its terrain.

This concentration of decision-making power at the hands of those who are the least materially impacted has created an industry where the safety of rail companies’ workers, the physical landscape, and the people surrounding railways are constantly at risk. This is possible because the danger posed to human and environmental health is already absorbed into rail companies’ profit structures. Through corporate consolidation, stock market cunning, technological negligence, government entrenchment, and union intimidation, Class I rail companies, or companies with revenue over $900 million in 2021, have evaded any real accountability. Based on this overarching strategy and its tangible effects on the people impacted, it becomes clear that the people involved in this industry who are deemed ‘essential’ are treated as disposable.

PART I: STATE OF THE INDUSTRY ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

The East Palestine derailment revealed the profound environmental fallout that can follow catastrophic rail accidents. But just as harmful is the quiet barrage of health risks endured by those who live near train tracks all around the country.

Rail lines release particulate matter, diesel exhaust, and other harmful pollutants, increasing communities’ risk of cancers and heart disease. A 2005 California Air Resources Board assessment found that the 18 major rail yards in California emit 210 tons of diesel pollution each year, putting millions of people at an elevated risk of cancer.

This pollution often disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color. Consider the case of North Richmond, CA, whose Black residents were pushed toward unincorporated areas close to nearby refineries and railroad tracks by Jim Crow-era housing policies. Richmond residents have higher rates

Pennsylvania Railroads (National Transportation Atlas Database, 2021)

A precarious present and potential future for North American freight rail

KATHERINE XIONG, MARI FAJNZYLBER, SACHA SLOAN ET AL.

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION YANNING SUN

of asthma and generally shorter lifespans than the rest of Contra Costa County. Richmond’s case is far from unique: Location siting for industrial facilities and rail lines is closely correlated with marginalized communities.

Similar battles over the placement of freight rail tracks continue to this day. In 2018, Norfolk Southern proposed a project to raise bridges across 24 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, with the goal of accommodating taller, double-stacked trains. The construction, which has not yet begun, would also destroy a local park, cutting off access to green space and chopping down decades-old trees.

Glenn Olcerst, whose organization Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh (RP3) campaigned against the proposal, found that 74 percent of the 174,000 affected Pittsburgh residents lived in an Environmental Justice Area (meaning an area where at least 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line and/or at least 30 percent identify as non-white). In this way, the project proved consistent with broader trends of inequity in transportation development.

Norfolk Southern assured residents that the proposed route would ease congestion and decrease noise and air pollution. But local university researchers found no evidence to support Norfolk Southern’s promise of lessened pollution. They did find that the firm would significantly increase its freight volume—and therefore its profits. “The tracks [ran] 20 to 25 trains a day on average,” Olcerst said. “But looking at the projections, they were going to be run at maximum capacity, which is 70 to 80 trains a day.”

While Norfolk Southern’s development has not been finalized, the project appears ready to begin development, as of a final town hall meeting in January. But even if RP3 had continued to resist Norfolk Southern’s plans, most

towns near rail lines or yards have no real way to avoid being thrown into what Olcerst calls the “blast zone” of petrochemical freight. As of 2022, a rail map of the Pittsburgh region reveals a snarl of at least six different rail lines that crisscross Allegheny County. Zooming out to Pennsylvania as a whole paints a similar picture, with rail lines crossing through almost every single county on the map.

It simply isn’t possible for any individual town to shield itself from pollution that crosses municipal borders, especially if the polluting rail lines lie just outside their regulatory spheres. And as the East Palestine case demonstrates, pollution left behind by freight rail lines may never truly go away.

The only surefire way for any of these towns to avoid the further accumulation of toxic damage would be for rail companies to upgrade existing rail infrastructure to accommodate trains that do not run on fossil fuels,

Railroads, an industry trade group representing most major North American freight rail companies, issued a report in 2023 opposing electrification due to its high capital costs.

In the meantime, Olcerst said he fears for his and other communities. “Every train that passes, I look at as Norfolk Southern playing Russian roulette with that city,” he said. “Every train is a spin of that gun barrel.”

WORKING CONDITIONS

On top of the freight rail industry’s environmental impacts, its workers face dangerous labor conditions, including direct chemical exposure to diesel and toxic cargo. These dangers are compounded by corporate cost-cutting and efficiency measures that sacrifice safety and livable working conditions on the altar of maximum profit.

In recent years, rail companies have pres-

and to tighten safety protocols for shipping hazardous materials. Though accidents like East Palestine have increased calls for greater safety regulation on trains, freight companies have made few gestures at investing in greener technology. In fact, the Association of American

sured workers into volatile working schedules and unpredictable on-call hours. Last December, Nick Wurst, a freight conductor and a representative of inter-union caucus Railroad Workers United (RWU), came to Brown to present his work to the Student Labor Alliance. Workers often face 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week, and may be on call 24/7, he explained. And these numbers do not include the time workers might remain on a train after their shift ends, if the train has not yet reached a station.

“We do not have set days off a month like most other jobs. We do not have weekends. We do not have a routine or accurate schedule. Every day is the same for us. We never know when we will be going to sleep on any given day or night,” a locomotive engineer for BNSF Railway told VICE News in September 2022.

These punishing schedules are often paired with unforgiving attendance policies. In 2022, railway corporation BNSF implemented a point-based attendance system, in which employees are allocated 30 points each and lose points for missing a day of work. Employees who lose all 30 points face disciplinary action—up to and including firing. Together, these scheduling pressures often lead to loss of sleep and increased job stress. Since the implementation of BNSF’s attendance system, seven hundred of the firm’s employees have quit.

Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), a cost-cutting measure popularized in the 2010s, has exacerbated these problems. Originally implemented at Illinois Central in the early 1990s, PSR is a broad strategy that normally involves rigid schedules, staffing cuts, and longer trains. Under PSR, typical freight train lengths have increased several miles, while crew sizes have shrunk.

The result has been significant job cuts across the industry. Over the past six years, Class I rail companies have cut their workforce by 29 percent (around 45,000 employees), with further cuts coming in the wake of the pandemic. Union Pacific, one of the major rail corporations, says on its website that PSR is “intended to benefit customers by providing consistent, reliable, predictable service.” But unions and customers have disagreed, reporting safety and service concerns, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. Such unsafe labor conditions come at a cost to everyone but the rail companies’ shareholders.

Some companies have even begun pushing for one-person rail crews. This could entail a single crewmember operating a train that is

occasionally

Train and Engine Service workers in response to question, “How often do you feel rested/alert during work?” (Federal Railroad Association, 2008) frequently always

several miles long, likely carrying at least a few cars of flammable or otherwise hazardous freight. Rail corporations and the federal government claim one-person crews would work, in light of contemporary technological advances. Rail unions say otherwise. Greg Hynes, director of SMART-TD, one of the largest rail unions in the country, emphasized that “there’s a check and balance” built into a two-person crew with both a conductor and engineer. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLE), another rail union, concurred, noting that two-person crews reduce distraction and ensure that the engineer has another set of eyes to help watch for hazards.

Workers leaving or being fired costs the industry institutional knowledge. Though hiring efforts have increased in the wake of pandemic supply chain challenges, newer employees often receive less training due to staffing shortages, leaving them less equipped to identify a risk of derailment on the job, let alone run a train alone—once again pushing workers to the brink. If untenable current conditions continue, they might drive a critical mass of skilled workers out of the industry for good.

than spending to improve its own operations).

Just one year ago, Norfolk Southern issued $10 billion in stock buybacks, money that could have instead been used to update technology or distribute benefits to its workers. Some experts now contend that the company’s use of funds for these buybacks (read: shareholder profits) over other uses, such as necessary safety improvements, may have contributed to the East Palestine disaster.

The clearest evidence of these misaligned incentives comes from the mouths of the companies themselves. In a March 7 press release, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency charged with investigating transportation accidents, highlighted “safety culture” as a key factor in five major accidents resulting in catastrophic derailments or workers’ deaths. Yet none of the three goals for the year from Norfolk Southern’s most recent shareholder presentation mention worker safety or safe operating conditions. The only reference to safety in the entire presentation is in the abstract phrasing of “safe, reliable, and resilient service.” And in Norfolk Southern’s 2021 Annual Report—a federally mandated self-review— not a single section mentions worker safety.

the system currently used in most North American train cars to detect rail car failures. It uses infrared sensors to detect changes in temperatures in the wheel bearings of train cars and triggers alarms for inspection if an overheating is detected.

In the hands of the private sector, therefore, the system will remain fundamentally broken. To say nothing of industry modernization or the imminent green transition, losing skill and knowledge could destroy any chance of resolving the industry’s problems today.

PROFIT STRUCTURE

Railway companies have fundamentally different priorities than the communities they supposedly serve. In fact, they often have strong financial incentives to go against the public interest.

The seven Class I freight rail companies employ around 87 percent of all U.S. and Canadian freight rail employees, and bring in 94 percent of freight rail industry revenue. These seven companies produced a combined total of $90.8 billion in operating revenue in 2022. The four largest companies—Union Pacific, CSX, and Norfolk Southern—alone employed over 110,000 workers with a combined total of $78.4 billion in operating revenues in 2022.

This tight concentration of powerful corporations allows them to collude when setting cargo prices for customers. They have few incentives to compete with one another. Though rail rates, measured as revenue per ton per mile, initially fell as a result of deregulation measures in the ’80s and ’90s, one DOT report found that freight rail rates had since increased by 96 percent from 2002–2019. By April 2022, despite these price hikes, delays and service issues had become so severe that the Surface Transportation Board directly issued orders to Class I companies to remediate them.

The companies claim that changes in service quality and rates are due to labor market difficulties. However, those labor market difficulties emerged out of companies’ own making. Service quality cuts have often been matched by increases in the companies’ profit margins and stock growth. CSX, for example, cut one-third of its jobs over the past decade while its stock price has increased over 300 percent since 2011, far outpacing broader stock market trends.

Furthermore, these railway companies lack any incentive to reinvest in their infrastructure. Most of them are the result of mergers in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and many are now publicly traded. BNSF, for example, has been owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 2010. Its business decisions are thus beholden to Berkshire Hathaway and its shareholders. The result is that companies prioritize stock buybacks (when a ‘public’ corporation purchases its own stock to return money to its shareholders, rather

What does get mentioned, though, are the risks to profit posed by increased government regulation around carbon emissions, transport of hazardous materials, and worker unions. These risks, in the words of the companies, include the possibility of “a catastrophic rail accident involving hazardous materials… exceed[ing] our insurance coverage” or “compromis[ing] critical parts of our rail network.” Unionized workers could “significantly increase our costs for health care, wages, and other benefits.” In other words, companies like Norfolk Southern have no significant financial incentive to improve on worker or environmental safety, beyond concerns about potential lawsuits or insurance claims. Yet they have direct financial incentives to oppose climate and safety regulation and unionized labor.

The fundamental problem with a for-profit ‘essential industry,’ is that it is often cheaper to deal with the aftermath of a disaster than to prevent it from happening in the first place. Perhaps companies don’t plan for disasters on the same scale as East Palestine. But certain losses that can be covered by insurance—derailments, loss of workers’ lives, environmental damage— can turn into expected, necessary risks. These risk protections can be written off in budgets. They are considered more cost-effective than an upfront investment in more sustainable, less dangerous systems: more efficient, effective machinery; longer-term job training and employment incentives like better wages, hours, and benefits; stringent safety protocols; etc.

Of course, insurance money does not erase the damage an accident causes to people. Workers who have been seriously injured or killed in accidents do not have their livelihoods restored. Residents of East Palestine may, like most victims of industrial disasters, face unknown health risks for years. While not all accidents are as visible and catastrophic as East Palestine, they continue to add up, and every last one leaves a mark.

A 2019 study by the DOT, however, showed that these detectors often fail to distinguish between healthy and defective bearings. It also found that systems that use temperature to gauge whether a bearing needs replacement did not catch problems in time to prevent accidents.

The East Palestine derailment has since been attributed to a hotbox detection failure: A report by the NTSB found that a faulty wheel bearing was about 38 degrees above the normal temperature when it passed through a hotbox detector 30 miles outside East Palestine, yet no alert went out. Another 30 miles and two hotboxes later, the temperature was over 250 degrees higher than normal. It was only then that the crew was alerted to overheating. Soon after, the train derailed.

In Glenn Olcerst’s words, the incident in East Palestine “was a fiery alarm.” This alarm has been going off for far too long, engineering expert Justin Roczniak told the Indy: The country’s very first derailment, on a freight train owned by “a distant ancestor to Norfolk Southern,” was also due to an overheated bearing.

Alternative technologies that more effectively predict bearing failures exist. One such technology, an accelerometer, detects changes in vibrations in addition to temperature shifts. The director of the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety noted that this system can identify changes in vibrations in defective bearings thousands of miles before an actual failure occurs, giving crew members ample time to stop and inspect bearings. Another technology, acoustic monitoring, checks the sound of bearings as a train passes by its sensors. Though this technology is not considered as precise as an accelerometer, it has still been said to detect failures faster than hotbox sensors.

TECH REINVESTMENT & DEVELOPMENT

Technology that could ease workers’ burden, reduce the risk of derailment, and lessen rail industries’ environmental impact already exists, and is utilized in other parts of the world. Profit structures in North American freight rail, however, have made their implementation impossible.

Take, for example, the hotbox detector,

However, this updated technology is not being implemented due to cost. As Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official, noted in an interview with CNN, “What they’re proposing will work, but it’s very, very expensive, and one does have to take cost into consideration.” While this may be true, rail companies have neglected to even set basic standards on existing hotbox sensors on the basis of cost, which suggests a fundamental deprioritization of basic safety measures among freight rail companies.

That this negligence has been allowed to continue, Olcerst said, comes down to a single core problem: self-regulation of safety standards amongst private rail companies. Companies like Norfolk Southern and other major players in the rail industry are allowed to autonomously change, update, and research their own safety regulations. No independent governing body, at the moment, truly has data on how effective the current systems in place are and whether the data reported by these companies (accident rates, increased safety measures through added brake systems, efficacy of chosen thresholds for bearing failure detections) are accurate.

Even with proposed legislation, such as the recently-introduced bipartisan Railway Act of 2023—which is unlikely to pass due to the adversarial efforts of rail-lobbyist-turned-sena-

tor John Thune—self-regulation will remain the industry standard. Moreover, the little oversight this law would require falls within the purview of the Federal Railroad Administration and the DOT, two agencies that Olcerst laments are “almost entirely staffed by former rail or petrochemical lobbyists or rail or oil executives.”

The Biden administration has championed rail as part of its climate and infrastructure strategy, announcing over $368 million in grants to improve rail infrastructure and increase supply chain resilience. It’s easy to see why: passenger and freight rail offer a natural alternative to our current reliance on carbon-intensive modes of transportation and shipping like cars, trucks, and planes.

For rail to truly be a safe and viable green technology within a green infrastructural transition, however, we would need an effective overhaul of the system. In particular, the rail industry would need to shift toward broadscale electrification. In technical terms, this would involve stringing electrified catenary wires across at least the main lines of America’s rail network and replacing aging diesel locomotives with electric ones. This green transition would have added safety benefits: Roczniak noted, for example, that an electrified system would have greater flexibility and could thus safely handle more types of freight.

In a system that still allows companies to set their own safety rules, disincentivizing maintenance and investment in more effective, more eco-friendly technology, this vision of trains leading the way into a decarbonized future is little more than a pipe dream. Grants to encourage innovation will have little impact without greater accountability for the corporations that have resisted that innovation en masse.

PART II: BARRIERS TO ACTION

If companies themselves have little to no incentive to fix industry problems and government regulation has been insufficient, we might turn to rail unions, whose members best know the labor conditions they in the industry face. Their organizing, however, has been consistently hamstrung by the 1926 Railway Labor Act (RLA), passed in reaction to growing union power during World War I.

During the 1910s, rail employees were vital to transporting wartime supplies, providing workers with an opening to fight for better labor conditions and strengthen their collective bargaining power. Historian Jon Huibregtse argues in American Railroad Labor and the Genesis of the New Deal, 1919-1935 (2010) that rail union strength reached its peak during this period, achieving a series of victories that had been previously met with resistance from rail carriers. Rail workers gained significant wage increases, standardization of work rules, and protection from discrimination on the basis of union membership.

After the war, however, the previously-nationalized operation of the nation’s railroads was handed back to private rail companies, who immediately tried to dismantle the union victories of the previous decade. In 1922, 400,000 rail shop workers went on strike, leveraging their status as essential workers to preserve the wage increases, standardization of work rules, and discrimination protections they had fought for during the war.

To limit union power, Congress passed the RLA, which mandated that unions and rail carriers make every reasonable effort to negotiate working conditions. If both parties are unable to come to an agreement, the legislation gives the president power to create an emergency board, which has 30 days to investigate and publish a report on the labor dispute. While the board is investigating, both parties are prohibited from all labor actions such as strikes or lockouts. The publication of the board’s findings sets off another 30-day cooling-off period during which unions are unable to strike or renegotiate their working conditions.

Nearly 100 years later, the private companies that control the railway industry continue

to exploit their workers. It was through the invocation of the RLA in negotiations last fall that Congress blocked a potential strike and forced through a national labor contract on terms unions had soundly rejected before.

Before then, 12 of the 13 major U.S. rail unions had signed on for collective bargaining to renegotiate the last, pre-pandemic deal. Widely publicized details from last summer’s interim deals included provisions like a 24 percent pay increase backdated to 2020, three sick days, and one personal day off per year.

Speaking on behalf of RWU last December, Wurst noted that the deal was far from the generous package it was presented as. Adjusted for inflation, the 24 percent pay increase would functionally be a pay cut compared to what wages would have been if they had kept pace with inflation. The additional sick days could only be used on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and would need to be reported 30 days in advance. Despite promises of no increases to out-of-pocket costs, healthcare premiums would double by 2025.

The largest unions in the country rejected this deal, sending the industry into the 30-day cooling-off period mandated by the RLA. An industry-wide strike seemed imminent until Congress voted to block a strike and impose a contract with the 24 percent pay increase

cidents entirely—something private companies fundamentally have no incentive to do.

Ultimately, if rail companies prove incapable of treating their workers and the environment properly, perhaps it is time to consider rail nationalization—i.e., putting the railroad under government control. Though opponents try to tar it as an un-American ‘socialist’ policy, railway nationalization has been a part of U.S. history since the 1900s, when the railroads were temporarily nationalized during World War I.

Though privatization quickly returned, rail workers fought tooth and nail to keep trains nationalized. Most notably, the Plumb Plan League, led by rail union legal counsel Glenn E. Plumb, sought a government buyout of the railroads, in which operations would be left to a board of government officials, operating officials, and worker representatives. Excess revenue would be divided between the government for infrastructure investments and employees for wage increases; if the surplus was too high, rates would be lowered the following year. This plan could have yielded higher-quality rail service in the U.S., but it was defeated by corporate owners.

The exact specifics of nationalization today remain unclear. Nevertheless, union members say it is a necessary first step to resolving the persistent issues that plague the industry. “If you were to nationalize the railroads right now, you could have a completely different operating paradigm, other than this precision scheduled railroading, [...] fairly quickly,” Roczniak said. “I have no idea how you’d do it, I just know it should be done.”

Based on the lack of union solidarity during last year’s contract negotiations, Wurst told the Indy that current union leadership isn’t up to the challenge of pushing nationalization. The leadership “shrugs their shoulders and says this is how it is. If there’s going to be a serious fight [for nationalization], that has to change,” he said.

but without any additional paid sick leave.

In short, the RLA allows Congress to severely limit unions’ leverage in the fight against increasingly unworkable working conditions, diverting attention and responsibility away from railway companies’ creation of these conditions and refusal to offer workable labor packages in response. The narrative becomes that freight rail, as an ‘essential industry,’ must continue operation no matter the costs.

Wurst, however, told the Indy that even before Congress intervened, unions were not fully prepared for a strike. “The idea of challenging the government is a scary thing,” he said, citing union leaders’ concerns about the precedent of past transport strikes broken by the federal government. (Wurst specifically referenced the 1981 air traffic controller strike, when 11,000 air controllers were summarily fired and blacklisted from future government service.)

To Wurst, however, this failure to organize also comes down to union leaders’ conservative sensibilities. “They don’t think that the power of the union is the ability to take away job action—they see it in the ability to vote, to use PAC money,” he said. “They accept the right of the rail companies to make profit off of our labor…You can’t ask for more than the company or shareholders are willing to give you.”

Challenging the norms of the industry, in short, will require re-orienting collective action away from corporate-friendly approaches—including considering the possibility of eliminating the need for corporate presence at all.

PART III: ORIENTING TOWARD THE FUTURE

Within the current system of privatized rail, it is not enough to call for companies like Norfolk Southern to be held accountable for the harm they cause. Accidents like the East Palestine derailment happen not because the private system has broken down, but because it is working exactly as intended. We need to shift to a system that works to prioritize worker and community safety and avoid ac-

RWU wants that change. Last October, RWU’s steering committee unanimously voted to approve a resolution supporting the consolidated public ownership of railroads across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In it, the organization calls for transnational, trans-industry organizing—solidarity even beyond the bounds of U.S. rail unions. The resolution calls attention to the reality that the conditions of freight rail—in terms of regulation, labor, and technology—will continue to directly impact everyone.

As ideas for a just transition and strategic infrastructure float through the White House and Congress, we need to recognize that developing the ‘infrastructure’ of an essential industry includes more than investment in new technology. Sustainable infrastructure cannot exist without equally reasonable labor practices for those who work in those industries and know them best.

Given the sluggish response from federal, state, and local governments to the ongoing crisis in East Palestine, it’s unlikely that this change will start from the top down. Instead, Wurst said, “We’re asking for other organizations, whether it’s labor organizations or community groups, to make their voices heard and put out their own statements in support of the idea of public ownership of the railroads.” Proactive stances, organizing, and coalition building will be critical to forcing the issue of nationalization back onto the policy-making table, even if it’s not clear yet exactly what nationalization would look like. Doing so opens up more complex, less resolvable conversations of infrastructural transition and investment, but we cannot imagine a better future without at least starting the conversation.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23, MARI FAJNZYLBER B’23.5, SACHA SLOAN B’23.5, LIZZY ZHANG B’23, KIAN BRAULIK B’24, VINI RUPCHANDANI B’24, MADDOCK THOMAS B’26 are on a precision schedule.

MAXWELL ROBINSON B’26 contributed research.

Accidents like the East Palestine derailment happen not because the private system has broken down, but because it is working exactly as intended.

Sunrise Brown’s new report starts with a September storm, one of the many deluges that have driven a staggering 104 percent increase in “heavy downpours” in the Ocean State. Climate change is already transforming the world around us. The report asks: what is Brown University’s role? “Brown doesn’t really make it that obvious how much money they take [from the fossil fuel industry],” Ethan Drake, Sunrise’s University task-force co-lead, told the College Hill Independent. “It’s not really in their interest to tell everyone … so we went and did the research.”

On Monday, February 27, Sunrise Brown released Dissociate Now: A Fossil-Free Brown Meticulously written and researched, Dissociate Now argues that Brown University has a responsibility to go further in fighting the climate crisis by becoming “the first university ever to completely dissociate from fossil fuels.”

“We’re sort of following the footsteps of a few other school student activist groups that had done similar things,” Drake said. In September 2022, Princeton University announced that it would dissociate from 90 fossil fuel companies— including a prohibition on fossil fuel research funding. “We really liked that idea,” Drake said.

The report’s release marked the launch of Sunrise Brown’s broader DIRE campaign, which aims to push Brown to “dissociate from fossil fuels and reinvest in Rhode Island.” Notably, DIRE pairs fossil fuel dissociation with a call for Brown to increase its financial commitment to Providence, joining groups like the Graduate Labor Organization and Students for Educational Equity, as the Indy has previously reported.

“Brown is very well positioned to do this,” Caitlyn Carpenter, one of the authors of the report, told the Indy. “It holds a lot of weight in its name, and is able to be a really good building block to strip an industry [of] that social license to operate.”

After the conclusion of a protest to launch DIRE on Friday, March 3, demonstrators brought a copy of the report to University Hall. “Our next step will be to review it in full,” Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told nonprofit newsroom ecoRI.

This recent mobilization heralds a new era for Sunrise Brown, one of 400 ‘hubs’ of the national youth-led Sunrise Movement, which pushes politicians to act on climate change. Brown’s campus environmental movement has enjoyed unprecedented success in the past few years: in March 2020, President Christina Paxson announced that the university would stop investing in fossil fuel extraction, and last spring the university committed to stop doing business with purveyors of science disinformation “to the best extent practicable.” These wins built on a long history of environmental activism at Brown, a history that the new report painstakingly documents.

But during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic pushed student organizing online,

Sunrise’s Brown chapter dissolved. It was only this past October that Sunrise Brown relaunched with a bang: even before the group’s first meeting, dozens of protesting Sunrise members flooded a classroom where an ExxonMobile representative was holding a recruiting event. “We have a lot of stuff on the agenda and a lot to do,” hub coordinator Isaac Slevin told the Brown Daily Herald at the time. With Dissociate Now and the DIRE campaign, the hub is taking its next big step.

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If Brown has already divested from fossil fuel, what does the report call for? The key word is dissociation, which entails more than divestment—a complete severing of financial ties. In this spirit, the report puts forward three main recommendations.

First, Sunrise Brown calls on the university to stop accepting gifts and research funding from fossil fuel companies. Since 2010, journal authors affiliated with the university have published at least 63 articles “with funding from the world’s fifty largest oil and gas companies,” according to the report, and from 2003 to 2019, Brown took in more than $20 million in donations from nonprofits associated with these firms or the “climate denial movement” more broadly. However, the report’s sum total only includes donations from nonprofits, which must report their giving to the government. Unreported contributions from individuals and private organizations mean “much more fossil fuel money flows to Brown.”

The $20 million figure comprises 93 contributions, but these were not all equal. The charitable arm of investment management company The Vanguard Group, which also funds “dozens” of right-wing think tanks, donated at least $10,157,039 to Brown over the 16-year period—nearly half of the total. For tracking donations, Sunrise Brown got help from Fossil Free Research, a coalition that works to stop fossil fuel funding in university scholarship. The work was not easy: these companies “have a lot of adjacent but related foundations that donate to universities or nonprofits,” design lead Dawson Phillips told the Indy. “It can be difficult because it’s kind of a convoluted and oftentimes intentionally opaque process.”

Second, the report recommends that Brown stop helping fossil fuel companies recruit Brown students. The university shouldn’t allow these companies to “market themselves to students as ethical and sustainable firms,” the report says, as ExxonMobil attempted last fall.

Finally, the report’s third recommendation is for Brown to offer retirement plans that are not tied to fossil fuels. Though Brown itself has ended such investments, many of the retirement portfolio options currently offered to faculty and staff are still reliant on the success of the fossil fuel industry.

At times it waxes antagonistic—“fossil fuel executives talk out of both sides of their mouths”—but mostly the report maintains a measured, scholarly tone, dissecting industry talking points and earnestly laying out the group’s case. And like a good legal brief, the report adopts several avenues of attack. “The

devastating impacts of the fossil fuel industry are not felt in statistics and risk assessment reports,” the authors write. Environmental pollution and climate change harm everyone, but especially marginalized communities. Even if one eschews ethics, allowing fossil fuel companies to fund scientific scholarship also creates an obvious “research bias,” the report says. And, of course, there is the “reputational damage associated with … planetary destruction.”

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With an executive summary, a methodology section, and a detailed appendix, the report has the feel of a professional piece of scholarship. The bright orange design, Phillips said, was meant to convey “a sense of urgency and seriousness.” The group didn’t want to use the “stereotypical green” of conventional eco-friendly projects, he continued—the issue of climate change is “destructive.” And the banners that run alongside the report’s text? Strips of collage made with photos of solar panels, wind turbines, and “photos of wildfires and money and businessmen,” according to Phillips.

“We were hoping to show how interconnected all these systems are and how it’s hard to talk about one without the other,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about the problems without addressing the solutions and vice versa.”

According to Ava Ward, a report contributor, research for the report started in the fall semester. Many members dedicated their time during winter break, and the team went through a process of “very rapid, kind of hectic editing, putting it all together, trying to get it ready as soon as possible” after the spring semester began, Ward said.

“We felt like investigative journalists,” Carpenter said. “You get to know people in a different context than you usually get to know people.” She added that the team began to “have these odd little inside jokes that are in relation to these very specific sentences that you put in a 20 page report that nobody else will ever [understand].”

“There are real students behind this,” she continued. “There are people who really care and who put a lot of time into it.” Research meetings included “digging up the dirt sessions,” where they worked on spreadsheets “for hours and hours.” But “all of that just went out the window when we were like ‘this is not efficient,” Carpenter said. “We need to streamline [a] consistent process for doing the research, because that’s what gives us validity in the end.”

Drake mentioned that the report shows not only Brown’s connections to the fossil fuel industry, but also that “it wouldn’t be impossible to dissociate.”

“It’s not like the majority of funding for research is coming from these companies. It’s just a really small percent,” he said. “We see this as an opportunity to pursue a better path.”

SACHA SLOAN B’23.5 likes appendices. KATHY WANG B’25 says ‘read the report!’

A revitalized Sunrise Brown calls on the university to sever ties with fossil fuels, once and for all

Arrangement of Talents

Found object (ガシャポン) digital collage

Restarting my childhood collection… in search of something smaller

Lola Simon B’24

Dori Walker B’24 MILK! Digital Video (5:18), Photography

This portrait aims to practice a refusal of access to someone’s mind and thoughts. A lot will be said that you will never hear or understand. What I give you access to as the auteur will require a watchful eye. Maybe wonder why you think you ought to understand just because you know someone must be talking. Behold what is given to you and take what you can from that. You are never entitled to another person. The person you’re privileged to know for a short while is quite wise and beaming.

Look up into the stars. How vastly, immensely expansive our universe is, how unfathomably complex, how full of infinite iterations of possibilities of opportunities. How does one chart a path through the nebulous and murky world in which we live? This week’s readers are facing cosmically challenging dilemmas, questions so intricately baffling that even yours truly, Indie, found herself lost in the maze of their nuances. Is there ever truly one correct answer to life’s deepest questions? Like, probably not. This week, instead of presenting my adviceseekers with one ultimate answer, I’ve invited guest columnist Jonathan Green to offer some alternative wisdom.

Okay, the truth is that the Managing Editors put me on probation after I made that joke about them refusing to get naked at crit last week, and now they’re making me share the column with a more “responsible” and “pure-minded” Indy staff writer who’s supposed to “keep me in check” and make sure I “keep my clothes on.” So go ahead—read my advice, read Jonathan’s “advice,” and choose for yourself who you want to listen to.*

Dear Pal-y-amorous,

This is simple. No. Of course not. Never. Frankly, I’m offended by the premise. Once you’ve hopped on one homie, the rest are off limits. Too many times have I seen beautiful friend groups torn asunder by the misguided maneuverings of foolhardy philanderers. Deep bonds of love and trust, built over years, obliterated. And all because some floozy (gender neutral) couldn’t exercise even the slightest bit of self-control.

But seriously—judgment gets cloudy when you start adding more homies into the mix. Of course, it takes two to tango. People know their friends, and probably understand what boundaries might or might not be crossed better than you do. But even if the responsibility is not entirely yours, there’s just no need to risk getting entwined in the tendrils of a tiff between friends.

Let’s think pragmatically here. Picture all the ways this could blow up in your face, all the countless people you might piss off. Who knows—it just might be one of their dads deciding if you get that Goldman internship this summer. Is any lust, or even love, worth losing that?

Also, just on principle—it’s not cool.

Dear Extra Virgin,

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, I really do. But some people emit a vibe so searingly sexual, so viscerally venereal, that people cannot help but throw themselves in their direction. And others give off an energy more suited to cheek pinching. That’s just the way it is. It’s preordained. We have no say in the matter. And I’m sorry to say it, but it seems to be you’ve found yourself in the latter category. The best advice I can give you is to embrace it. Be proud of your chaste charm. Use it! By now, I’m sure you’ve discovered your strengths—you’ve had to. So play them up. Wear them on your sleeve. Know what you’re good at and do it. Walk up to someone at a party and tell them you have all of the presidents memorized in order. Or that you can recite every line of Revenge of the Sith. Someone, somewhere is bound to be into it. Because no matter how hard we may try to will it otherwise, no matter how many haircuts we get or new styles we try or how hard we work on our posture, we can only ever really be ourselves. So just accept it. Let it be. Shuffle off the coils of corporeal consternations, sublimate yourself to the unknowable whims of the cosmos. Now that’s sexy.

Respectfully,

Dear Pal-y-amorous,

This is complicated. When considering hooking up with more than one homie in the same friend group, there are a whole bunch of factors you need to take into account. First of all, what was your relationship with the first homie? What’s the first homie’s relationship with the second homie? Is the second homie hotter than the first homie? Is there a third homie in the picture? Homie hopping is kind of like parkour—if you’re going to jump from one thing to another thing, you better make sure you’ve taken distance into consideration. If these homies are extremely close friends, getting between them could be messy. If one of these homies was in a serious relationship with you, your hop to one of their friends could really hurt them.

There are no truly ideal conditions for a stunt of this kind, but if you really must, hesitate before you hop. Leave some time between one homie and the next. Maybe stick with homies in different subsets of the friend group. Ask yourself: Is it worth it? If you’re only interested in a casual dalliance, there have to be at least 500 other friend groups full of options—why double-dip in this one?

But maybe Homie #1 and Homie #2 have a chill agreement about hooking up with the same people. Or maybe it’s true love with Homie #2, and Homie #1 seems like they could find it in their heart to someday understand. Or maybe Homie #2 is INSANELY hot and you’ll regret not leaping for the rest of your life. In that case… go on and hop. Homie hopping might lead to broken hearts, but parkour can lead to, like, broken arms. And that’s way worse.

Dear Extra Virgin,

It’s true—some people walk into a room and just ooze sex uncontrollably. Like, it cascades from their pores. All they have to do is stand there, sex emanating from their very being like a force field of radioactivity, but in a hot way.

The good news is: There’s no reason you can’t be one of these people, too! Just like radioactivity, extreme sex vibes aren’t something you have to be born with. Like a soon-to-be superhero stumbling into a vat of toxic waste, you can start developing your sex-vibe superpowers at any time. It’s a long, hard process, but I’m here to be your wise old man mentor figure, your sexy Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, that’s redundant, but you get the idea.

It sounds cliché, but one of the most important aspects of emitting a sexy vibe is maintaining a sexy mindset. It’s kind of like a Jedi mind trick, when you think about it. Walk into the room as if your radioactive sex force field is already there. Tell yourself, “Sex is cascading from my pores and everyone in this room can taste it.” If you don’t believe it at first (and you probably won’t), fake it! Then fake it again! (This is the only circumstance in which Dear Indy condones faking it.)

The process of developing an uncontrollably sexy aura is the process of pretending to have an uncontrollably sexy aura. There’s nothing about you, or anyone, that is inherently non-sexual. I referenced Star Wars twice in this answer and both times it was very sexy—because I decided it would be. (And that’s impressive, because everyone knows Jedi are celibate.) With practice, you can get there, too.

It won’t be easy, but the path of a hero never is.

*You choose me, right?

Upcoming Actions & Community Events

Email Representatives to Support Rhode Island’s Bill 5896/Senate Bill 0372

Rhode Island’s Bill 5896/Senate Bill 0372 would criminalize sexual assault conducted by police officers. Write to the representatives on the House and Senate Judiciary committees asking them to vote yes on these bills. For more information, access https://tinyurl.com/ Criminalize-SA-by-Police

Saturday 3/18 @1PM: Speakout: Peace in Ukraine - Say No to Endless U.S. Wars

Join the Rhode Island chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation for a speakout event coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the weekend of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Attend the demonstration here to demand peace negotiations in Ukraine, the abolishment of NATO (to end U.S. militarism and sanctions), and funding for people’s needs rather than war, among other causes.

Location: RI State House Steps, 82 Smith St, Providence, RI 02903

Monday 3/20 @6-9PM: SistaFireRI Justice Circle

SistaFireRI, an organization aimed at building collective power with and by women of color for social, economic, and political transformation, will be hosting their monthly Justice Circle on Monday. This membership meeting is open to all women of color and nonbinary people of color living in Rhode Island. Dinner and childcare is provided. Registration is required and free, and can be accessed at bit.ly/MarchJC2023

Location: Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St, Providence RI 02907

Arts

Saturday 3/18 @2-4PM: RUTH: Justice Ginsburg In Her Own Words Film Screening & Speaker

Community Libraries of Providence is hosting a film screening of RUTH

Following the film, constitutional and civil rights attorney Lynette Labinger, a celebrated social advocacy lawyer, will speak. Reserve a spot at this event here: https://tinyurl.com/Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg-film

Location: Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906

Monday 3/27 @6:30-8PM: RI Queer Book Club

Hosted by Small Format, a gallery and cafe run by a queer cooperative, and The Queer Umbrella, a trans-founded, queer-led platform for accessing LGBTQ+ resources, this book club will grow your ability to imagine a new world and build your toolkit for resistance. The club will be reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, with chapters 1-12 being discussed on March 27 and chapters 13-25 being discussed on April 24. You can buy the book through @heartleafbooks on Instagram, a queerowned business, or borrow a copy at the public library.

Location: Small Format, 335 Wickenden St, Providence, RI 02903

Friday 3/24 @7PM: Esther Yi Book Talk at Riffraff Bookstore

Join writer Esther Yi in a discussion on her book Y/N (2023). Y/N is a novel about “a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.”

Location: 60 Valley St Unit 107A (in the courtyard), Providence, RI 02909

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

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

+ Help Community Arts Space Focal Recoup Expenses

Donate at https://tinyurl.com/Help-Focal-recoup-expenses.

Focal is an all-inclusive art gallery and DIY collaborative space in Pawtucket, RI. Focal will no longer be operating out of the space they have used to host events, and need help with the outstanding costs of equipment, utilities, overhead, and other expenses.

+ Donate to RI Community Court Debt Fund

Donate at https://tinyurl.com/DARE-Community-Court-Debt-Fund

Help Rhode Islanders facing financial hardship keep their freedom, jobs, and families by donating to DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equity), an organization that operates a fund to help members of the community pay off court debts that often accumulate without their knowledge and can lead to warrants for their arrest.

+ RailRoad’s Fundraising for Stability After Incarceration

Donate through Venmo @theorytakespraxis with the caption “re-entry fund” or at www.gofundme.com/f/ fundraising-for-stability-after-incarceration.

RailRoad is a Providence organization that supports incarcerated individuals and fights to abolish the prison-industrial complex. RailRoad is raising funds for their soon-to-be released friend named A, who is a community advocate challenging injustices of the carceral state. DM their Instagram @railroadpvd for any questions, if you need an alternative to Venmo, or to get involved.

BULLETIN SPOTLIGHT: Support the Solitary Confinement Reform Act

On Thursday, March 9, just before the start of the legislative session, a group of activists stood on the RI statehouse rotunda steps holding signs that read, “STOP TORTURE,” “REFORM SOLITARY,” and “THIS IS ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH.” The activists gathered to advocate for the Solitary Confinement Reform Act, a bill introduced to the Senate Judiciary Committee a couple days prior. Along with other restrictions on prisons’ use of the punitive practice, the bill caps the amount of time incarcerated individuals can spend consecutively in solitary confinement at 15 days.

A series of speeches ensued, all containing the same essential message: incarcerated people are entitled to dignity and respect as human beings, and this bill would be a step toward ensuring that right. Brandon Robinson, a formerly incarcerated man, spoke about the lives at stake in the struggle for prison reform. Elisha Woodley recounted her sister Charlene Woodley’s struggle against abusive correction officers while in solitary confinement, which resulted in her passing in 2022. Elisha sees this bill as a way of mitigating future abuses of people in solitary confinement. Jonathon Acosta, a state senator representing District 16, and Nick Horton, the co-executive director at OpenDoors, spoke on the need for broader systemic reform.

Eddie Franco, who spent years in solitary confinement, said that this bill is about sending a message to the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC). “There is a lack of transparency with [RIDOC]. They have no oversight whatsoever,” stated Franco in an interview with the College Hill Independent. According to Franco, the bill is about protecting incarcerated people from the brutality of the carceral state, as well as sending a message to RIDOC that their inhumane actions and policies have not gone unnoticed.

The Solitary Confinement Reform Act faces an uphill battle, and the activists know it. The current objective is to get the bill passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee and onto the senate floor for a vote. Activists will continue to raise public awareness and lobby public officials to support the bill.

Stop Torture RI, a coalition involved in organizing this event, meets every Thursday from 4:30-6:00 p.m. at 340 Lockwood St. Providence, RI, 02907. All are welcome to attend. To learn about ways to participate, fill out this form: https://tinyurl.com/Support-SCRA.

Other organizations involved with the event were OpenDoors, whose main objective is to support formerly incarcerated individuals, and Direct Action For Rights (DARE), which has multiple initiatives to bring about social, economic and political justice in Rhode Island. More information can be found on their websites below:

OpenDoors: opendoorsri.org

Dare: daretowin.org