Fall 2016 Issue 6

Tufts Observer

VOLUME CXXXI, ISSUE 6

December 5, 2016

Tufts as a Sanctuary Campus

A Look Into Our Archives

DevTech Gets Kids Off Their iPhones

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Page 18

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The Home Issue

Tufts Observer The Tufts Observer has been Tufts’ student publication of record since 1895. Our dedication to indepth reporting, journalistic innovation, and honest dialogue has remained intact for over a century.

Today, we offer insightful news analysis, cogent and diverse opinion pieces, creative writing, and lively reviews of current arts, entertainment, and culture. Through poignant writing and artistic elegance, we aim to entertain, inform, and above all challenge the Tufts community to affect positive change.

@tuftsobserver www.tuftsobserver.org

December 5, 2016 Volume CXXXI, Issue 6 Tufts Observer, SInce 1895 Tufts’ Student Magazine

Theme Our final issue of the semester centers on concepts of home, which serve as an entry point to examine issues as close to us as our own campus and our own selves. Home has different meanings for different people—it can be a place, a person, a feeling. How does your identity influence your ideas of home? What does it mean when home feels unattainable?

Staff Editor-In-Chief // Carly Olson Managing Editor // Eve Feldberg Creative Director // Chase Conley

Section Editors

Web Columns // Jordan Lauf Features // Sahar Roodehchi News // Will Norris & Claire Selvin Opinion // Julia Doyle & Ben Kesslen Campus // Greta Jochem & Emma Pinsky Web // Susan Kaufman & Misha Linnehan Poetry & Prose // MT Snyder & Liza Leonard Arts & Culture // Carissa Fleury & Jamie Moore Tech & Innovation // Lily Hartzell & Lauren Samuel

Art, Photo, & Design

Art Directors // Nina Hofkosh-Hulbert & Rachel Cunningham Lead Artists // Jake Rochford & Annie Roome Photo Director // Lily Herzan - Photo Editor // Kyle Scott Designers // Abigail Barton, Alexandra Benjamin, Josh Goodman, Caroline Smith, Hannah Vigran & Conrad Young

Multimedia

Publicity // Yumi Casagrande & Ashley Miller Video // Anastasia Antonova, Evie Bellew & Aaron Watts Interactive // Gabby Bonfiglio, Jade Chan, Danielle Kong & Kayden Mimmack

Writing & Copy

Staff Writer // Katie Saviano Lead Copy Editor // Dana Guth Copy Editors // Matt Beckshaw, Henry Jani, Julia Press & Sivi Satchithanandan

Contributors Ben Averill, Audrey Falk & Madeline Lee

Contents

13

Photo Inset

18

Campus

20

Tech & Innovation

From The Kids

Our Archives

Robots & Rugrats

Luca Eisen

Ben Kesslen

Jordan Lauf

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Letter From The Editors The O Managing Board

12 It Rotted In Her Belly Aishvarya Arora

FEATURE

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POETRY

PROSE

What Makes a Sanctuary?

17 Untitled Tiara Bhatacharya

Julia Doyle & Sahar Roodehchi

OPINION

OPINION

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22 Standing on Broken Values

Homesick

Layla Rao

Anonymous

NEWS

24 Checking In or Checking Out?

NEWS

8

The High Stakes of Internet Hacks

Liza Leonard & MT Snyder OPINION

Lena Novins-Montague

26 Finding Home Muna Mohamed

ARTS & CULTURE

10 Writing a Revolution

PROFILE

Carissa Fleury & Sahar Roodehchi

28 A Chat with Karl Stephan

COVER BY ANNIE ROOME

Letter From The Editors As the semester comes to a close, we are sitting, once again, in the MAB lab—a tiny, coffee-scented space above Brown and Brew—producing yet another copy of the Observer. It is 2:00 am on a Tuesday night, and the printers will start churning out the magazine in a matter of hours.

If you think this sounds like a less-than-glamorous experience, you’re right. But it’s one that we have been continually excited about every other week when layout rolls around.

Independently, and for a variety of different reasons, we all care deeply for this publication. We care about the passion and vision that our staff brings to each late layout night, the care our artists put into the work you see on each page, and the important opportunity to be a voice for the Tufts community.

This semester, we are all proud of a lot of things this publication has brought to Tufts. We have sought to provide relevant

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and hard-hitting content for our campus. We have given platforms to voices that aren’t always heard, and we have told stories that need to be told. But there is always more work to be done, things to do better, and more intentionally, and with more care, so we come back every week and every semester and every year.

Thank you to everyone who makes this magazine possible—our staff, the people who clean the MAB Lab, and our friends Jerry and Patti, the printers—and also to our readers, who motivate us to seek out important stories and continue the conversations we start.

We hope the Observer this semester has pushed you to think more or differently about our campus and our world.

We know it has for us.

Feature

What Makes A Sanctuary?

By Julia Doyle & Sahar Roodehchi

December 5, 2016

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Feature

O

n November 16, college students all over the country walked out of afternoon classes to demonstrate support for Movimiento Cosecha’s #SanctuaryCampus campaign, which “is about claiming spaces of resistance and protection for our country’s most vulnerable people—including undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Black people, and queer folks,” according to the organization’s website. Tufts students joined in the movement, collecting outside of Olin Hall shortly after 2:30 pm. There, the organizers of the walkout explained the movement, shared personal narratives, and appealed to the Tufts administration to become a sanctuary campus. President Anthony Monaco, who was present at the rally, addressed the crowd and affirmed the university’s commitment to its students and promised to figure out the institution’s next steps to help protect undocumented students on campus. While President Monaco did not declare Tufts to be a sanctuary campus at the rally, his commitment to exploring the option reflects a growing trend across the nation—educational institutions are determining how to best protect undocumented students under a new and undefined political landscape.

Although the establishment of a sanctuary campus is relatively new, sanctuary policies have precedent and have been enacted throughout history, often in sites like churches or cities, according to Sociology Professor Helen Marrow. While there is no official definition of a “sanctuary city” (or a sanctuary university), the contemporary movement started in churches, during the 1980s, to protect Central Americans who were denied refugee status and at risk for deportation. Although each case is carried out differently, sanctuary cities generally commit to resisting federal or state immigration enforcement policies in an ef-

fort to protect undocumented immigrants.

San Francisco, which became a sanctuary city in 1989, asserted its non-compliance with the federal government’s immigration enforcement policies and added an ordinance prohibiting the use of city funds to assist the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Somerville is one of the 32 sanctuary cities in America, a status that Mayor Joseph Curtatone has vowed to protect under a Trump presidency. In an open letter written on November 21, Mayor Curtatone wrote, “One-third of Somerville’s residents are documented immigrants. These are our neighbors. We will not treat them like suspects at every turn. Sanctuary means we don’t hand over persons for deportation for civil offenses like driving with a broken tail light. That breaks up families and fuels a broken immigration system.” The number of sanctuary cities in the US has increased over the past 30 years, each negotiating the precarious distinction between breaking federal law (which localities are not allowed to do) and engaging in, as Marrow said, “non-cooperation.” Marrow explained that most sanctuary cities “don’t necessarily ask about or engage in activities that ask about legal status or disclose legal status to federal immigration officials.”

The movement to create sanctuary campuses highlights the differences between localities and educational institutions, which have different options and resources.

Marrow explained that campuses could use “student privacy laws and…Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to protect the information of all students and not disclose that information.” It is currently illegal for educational universities to violate FERPA, which establishes a student’s right to keep educational records private, unless there is a federal or state-issued warrant.

One of the first educational institutions to declare itself a sanctuary campus on November of this past year, Wesleyan University worked to craft specific clauses that not

only state the institution’s commitment to protecting undocumented students, but also position the University to have legal constitutional backing with these actions. In an article for the Wesleyan Argus, student Jake Lahut outlined this process, which required the Wesleyan University President Michael Roth to collaborate with legal counsel to write the clauses, modeled after sanctuary city ordinances. They give the University authority to prevent staff from assisting ICE and are designed to help legally protect the institution, especially if the government attempts to withdraw federal funding or issue a lawsuit, as a response to if (and when) the university fails to comply with federal law.

However, universities across the country who are researching sanctuary status are not sure how they could respond to physical raids on campuses. Lahut notes that while Wesleyan asserted that it would not voluntarily aid the government in the exposure or expulsion of undocumented students, they will not be able to stop the federal government from conducting raids.

Marrow also acknowledges the limitations of the movement. “Sanctuary anything—at a city level or a campus level—can’t offer holistic true protection,” and while institutions can speak out or “agree not to do more than federal and state law require them to do, they can’t actively break the law.”

Despite this, there is still significant symbolic power in becoming a sanctuary campus. Becoming a sanctuary campus expresses support for undocumented students and their families, and reaffirms their right to live and learn in the United States. Marrow referred to the symbolic implications of becoming a sanctuary campus as “enormous” for “the message it sends to the rest of the university—not just the student body but for everyone in the community that this is the stated principle and moral values that Tufts stands for.”

Senior Blaine Dzwonczyk, a member of United for Immigrant Justice (UIJ), believes that Tufts has an imperative to stand by these moral values by declaring a sanctuary campus. She said, “If Tufts wants to live up to its alleged values of social jus*name has been changed

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Feature

tice, the administration needs to respond clearly to UIJ’s demands, and use its power and resources to stand between undocumented people and the threat of deportation.” Students call for Tufts to act on its commitment to creating an inclusive and safe community. She added, “Tufts has an opportunity right now to refuse to comply with an immigration system that is already violent and destructive to so many people, and which will only cause more damage under a Trump administration.”

According to Marrow, Tufts was a sanctuary place at another point in history, when the estate was a stop on the Underground Railroad that actively resisted the Fugitive Slave Law. Unitarian abolitionist George Luther Stearns used the space that is now EliotPearson to establish a haven for people escaping enslavement. Students involved with the sanctuary campus movement are calling for Tufts to consider its position, power, and obligation to protect its community.

In 2015, Tufts announced it would actively recruit and accept undocumented students. While the University provides support groups and financial aid to undocumented students, there is a general lack of awareness on campus of undocumented students and their experiences. “Tufts students are not informed about what undocumented students are,” said A*, an undocumented first-year. “People don’t realize that having citizenship is a privilege. And sometimes it’s something that’s underestimated. So it’s important to talk about.” However, it is imperative that these dialogues—on campus at Tufts and nationwide—resist the tendency to tokenize undocumented students and consider all undocumented people whose experiences and identities vary. “One undocumented student does not talk on behalf of all of them,” A explained, “We share some experiences but it doesn’t mean we’re the same people.” Furthermore, students advocate respect for the privacy of undocumented individuals. Guadalupe Garcia, a sophomore and member of UIJ, said, “Keeping in mind that this is also a relatively new movement and that so many students are still scared or wary about being vocal about their status, [w]hen someone shares that with you it’s extremely intimate and

it’s something you should be really careful about repeating back to others.”

Students say the movement should not only work to raise general awareness on campus, but also to provide more services to undocumented students. According to Garcia, “If Tufts does declare [a sanctuary campus], there is still so much to be done. The school is still trying to meet the initial demands made by UIJ when we first pushed Tufts to openly accept undocumented students, one being

Becoming a sanctuary campus expresses support for undocumented students and their families, and reaffirms their right to live and learn in the United States. creating a space for undocumented students (amongst several other demands)….

Some other universities have spaces like these and Tufts should really look into making this space a reality, looking to other undocumented-friendly universities as a model.” M*, an undocumented sophomore, described another means of support for undocumented students. “Having somebody on campus that is knowledgeable about the issues of undocumented students” and can provide support either to find “opportunities” for undocumented students or “get those that can’t work legally prepared for the when they graduate as to what their opportunities can be” would provide more institutional support for undocumented students, they said.

Marrow spoke to the urgency of the sanctuary campus movement, and expressed optimism that “we haven’t seen universities jump in line this quickly on a lot of things in a long time.” Still, the uncertain future demands that we, as students and com-

munity members, must be prepared—for vigilantism, for potential raids, for upholding moral purpose. “Every student on this university should be asking [themselves] what happens if someone walks onto this campus with a federal warrant,” Marrow said, “What do all of us do?” The success of any movement to establish a sanctuary and protect undocumented people seems to depend on widespread community support and mobilization. “Everyone should care about the undocumented rights movement beyond just having friends or classmates that are undocumented,” said Olivia Dehm, a senior and member of UIJ. “No human being is illegal…it should be so wrong to ever consider that a human being, just on the basis of their geographic location, can be treated as if their very existence is illegal.”

Dehm pointed out this is especially important in the United States, which was formed through the seizure and occupation of Indigenous land and genocide of Indigenous peoples by colonizers.

Students and professors alike have identified a moral imperative to resist any effort to further dehumanize and alienate a group of people. As Dehm said, “I want people to consider that all undocumented people have rights, not just bright college students...Our undocumented students have families, and their families have rights too. This movement [to establish sanctuary spaces] needs to be fiercely inclusive.”

Dzwonczyk added, “Tufts cannot simply welcome undocumented students when it’s convenient for the institution, or make empty promises about becoming a ‘sanctuary;’ they need to take bold, concrete steps—as other universities have done— to protect undocumented students, staff, and their families.” The sanctuary campus movement works not only for those under the jurisdiction of academic institutions, but also for all those living under the threat of detainment and deportation. Ultimately, action on campus must be informed by a greater awareness of the scope of what’s at risk. M expressed their hope that, through the sanctuary campus movement, “we can continue to work together to make this campus different in how it perceives the undocumented population as whole, not just on this campus.”

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Opinion

By Anonymous

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ART BY CONRAD YOUNG

Opinion

“A

re you going home for the break?” is a pretty mundane question—not infrequent to small talk as the semester comes to a close. I’m sure most people can whip up a response without a single thought. It is a simple yes or no question, after all. “Yeah, I’m going home,” you might say. Or maybe, “No, I’m traveling for a while.” Either way, the answer is pretty clear: you’re either going home or you’re not. But what does it mean to be at “home?” Defining home is certainly not the same for everyone, but there are some qualities that overlap. It is a place where you may feel the most relaxed and comfortable, somewhere you generally fit in, somewhere you’ve lived for a while. Home could be somewhere all your loved ones are, where you know all the street names, or the only place you feel like you’re on familiar ground.

Along those lines, my home is surely in Oklahoma. Maybe I wasn’t born there, but I spent a good 15 years of my life there, and every memory of growing up is centered around Oklahoma—scraped knees, middle school crushes, botched haircuts. In the third grade I won the school spelling bee, several years later I made the state orchestra, and one time I spent the whole afternoon collecting bottle caps at the shore of the lake near my church. Of course I’m a die-hard Thunder fan, I put hot sauce on everything I eat, and I know all the words to Jesus Take the Wheel. With all that in mind, it’s not hard for me to say that Oklahoma is my home.

Nowadays, however, I’m actually starting to question whether my home really is in Oklahoma, as I have gradually become alienated from everything that made it feel like a part of me. My mom is selling the house, the Thunders suck, and they closed my favorite restaurant. Within 2016 alone, my mom and brother disowned me, my friends chose to side with my perpetrator, and almost everyone I know voted for Trump. In the place I called my home, I now feel the dramatic pain that can only be personified by the over-the-top acting exhibited by a character in a soap opera who loves someone who doesn’t love them back. And it’s pretty accurate, I think, to describe it this way—I love something that doesn’t love me back. In the place I be-

lieved was my home, people on the street often shout at me, “GO HOME,” as though I’m not already there.

Evidently it’s really difficult for most people to believe that my true home is in America. Apparently I need some kind of written proof that I belong here, and even then I’m labelled an “alien,” some kind of being that will never truly be one of us. They portray me as extraterrestrial, making everyone think that my place is to remain hidden behind a wall. According to US law, my true home is in South Korea, and according to US documents, that’s where I am now. (News flash: I’m not! Surprise!)

What I think those people don’t understand is that I really wish that were my reality. I want more than anything to have grown up in a place where there isn’t even a question as to whether I belong. If I had instead spent those 15 years in the place they keep telling me is my home, perhaps I could have experienced the joy of having a big extended family and enjoying old traditions together. I would be much worse at English, but at least I wouldn’t ever have to be prepared with two different answers to the question, “Where are you from?” and I certainly wouldn’t keep a list of creepy dudes with Asian fetishes to avoid. I might instead be writing about checking my privilege right now. Maybe if I had never come to this country, my family wouldn’t be broken, and I wouldn’t have ever been poor, or hungry, or homeless.

Although I now have a roof over my head and food in my stomach, I am still homeless, in a sense. A lingering feeling reminiscent of the innocence and pain of freshly scraped knees remains in the pit of my stomach, and I recognize it as the familiar, childlike ache of longing to be heard, to be seen, to be loved. I just want so badly to exist in a place where as soon as I start to cry everyone will know I am hurting and my wounds will be properly dressed. I want to wail, and thrash, and sob, and have my blubbering cries be met with soothing voices telling me they’ll fix it and that everything will be okay. If I storm away and slam my door shut in a fit of anger, I want them to knock softly on the door, calling my name, and then beckon me to come back to them, promising we’ll mend things together. Instead,

my tears fall silently as I stand hidden in the shadows, frozen by fear, and before I can even think about crying out for help, I am silenced by the harsh voices spitting pure hatred at me. They tell me that I have somehow wronged them, and for that I don’t deserve to be in pain. The logic follows in some twisted way—how can I feel pain if I’m not even human?

But I am resilient, and I have yet to lose faith. Growing up, I bounced from family to family, looking for one to care for and nurture me, before I found myself at Tufts with the biggest, most loving family I could have ever asked for. Of course, we’re not a perfect family, and there’s one thing I’m still working out with them.

You see, I sent them a love letter, signing it “Do you love me back? Check yes or no,” and they didn’t even respond (*cough cough* Tony Monaco). But I haven’t given up on them yet.

Someday when I find my true home, I will feel as though I’m welcome and recognized as more than just “an illegal.” I’ll live somewhere that I can jaywalk in the street without fear of being ticketed, then interrogated, then arrested, then deported.

Photos of me will portray myself smiling happily with my new family, and then I can burn the fake portraits of me posing with my green-card-marriage step-father that I only just met. I’ll host a big dinner party with all my friends and look around at their faces with gratitude untainted by anxiety for my future with them. We’ll argue about politics without heavy hearts, and maybe I’d shed a tear as I watch who wins in the first election I ever voted in, but I won’t feel afraid. At my first Red Sox game, during the national anthem, I’ll put my hand over my heart with pride, as though I’ve been singing it my whole life.

Then on the grungy subway ride back I’ll think, What the hell are they spending my tax money on? And soon, I’ll fly back to Korea for a brief trip to meet my family for the first time, then return safely in a few short weeks. At the airport, they’ll scan my passport without even blinking, and then upon arriving at my house, I’ll crawl straight into bed and sigh in utter relief to be back in a comforting familiarity. I’ll take a deep breath and think, I am home.

But for now, I’ll just fake it till I make it.

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News

The High Stakes of Internet Hacking

By Lena Novins-Montague

Y

our toaster can be hacked. Your refrigerator can be hacked. Your thermostat can be hacked. And when hacked, your everyday devices can be harnessed to launch a cyber attack. On October 21, across the US and Europe for several hours, that is precisely what happened. Websites that are integral to people’s everyday lives, like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, and Reddit, refused to load.

Experts are saying that this was the largest attack of its kind thus far.

These internet disruptions, which primarily affected the northeast United States, are believed to have been caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

DDoS attacks exploit the way websites are accessed. When a URL is typed into a browser, the Internet doesn’t immediately direct to that website. Rather, there’s an intermediate step that must occur first, in which the URL must be matched with the IP address. Dyn, a major Domain Name System (DNS), is one of the companies that facilitates this step. Their clients are some of the most highly frequented websites in the world. On the day of the most recent disruptions, Dyn received so many requests to convert URLs into IP addresses that the server became overwhelmed and could no longer process requests.

This influx of requests didn’t happen because the number of people trying to check Twitter suddenly spiked—it happened because the people behind this attack hacked devices all over the world 8

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in order to bombard Dyn with artificial requests. In general, DDoS attacks hack computers to form an electronic army that invades servers. These armies are referred to as Botnets. But this attack was of particular significance because it was accomplished through the use of a Mirai Botnet, meaning that instead of hacking computers, everyday devices like internetconnected toasters, refrigerators, and thermostats were targeted.

This was possible because the objects in our world are increasingly linking to the Internet, creating what is known as the “internet of things” (IoT). The IoT includes DVRs, routers, baby monitors, toasters, refrigerators, and thermostats. Unlike computers, IoT devices do not hold personal or sensitive information. Because of this, companies have less incentive to invest in the security of such devices and consequently they are left extremely vulnerable to hackers. On the day of the attacks, IoT devices were hacked and manipulated to overload Dyn. It’s as if 5,000 people are yelling at you, giving you directions for how to drive into Boston. Only a handful of these driving directions are correct. But you’re not going to be able to follow the accurate ones, because you can’t hear them over the screeching of all the faulty directions. You’ll never get into Boston. The website will never load.

It’s not the first time an attack like this has taken place. The hacktivist group “Anonymous” has been launching DDoS

attacks with political motivations for years.

In January 2011, “Anonymous” responded to the Arab Spring and the ensuing protests in Egypt by knocking multiple Egyptian official government websites offline.

In June of 2016, they targeted and took down the Internet Archive, a site that is allegedly utilized by ISIS, for several hours.

While “Anonymous” may be at the forefront of this kind of hacking, they have not claimed responsibility for the recent October attacks. In general, “Anonymous” launches attacks with the intention of preserving the freedom of speech and resisting the influence of the government. This attack doesn’t seem to be along the lines of these motives and the party responsible remains unknown.

As of now, it’s impossible to determine the motivation behind this attack. A penetration tester at the security firm Redscan, Robert Page, commented on the anonymity in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s interesting that nobody has yet claimed credit for the attack,” he said. “The relative ease at which DDoS attacks are to execute, however, suggests that the perpetrators are most likely teenagers looking to cause mischief rather than malicious state-sponsored attackers.”

Fahad Dogar, an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Tufts, said the attack could be economically motivated, though it’s also possible that a random hacker simply wanted to prove a point.

ART BY MADELINE LEE

News

“The motivation could really vary, from economic motivations. If a website is down, it’s losing reputation, it’s losing revenue, it’s losing users. There are non-economic considerations, too. Many hackers are just trying to prove a point, to test out their skills. In some cases, there are hackers who will do an attack to bring something to the attention of everyone. All of these possibilities exist.”

A study conducted in 2012 by the Ponemon Institute, which researches security and data protection, reported that it costs a company $22,000 for every minute they are down during a DDoS attack.

However, the threat is not merely economic. While not having access to Spotify for an afternoon may not seem like a big deal, these internet disruptions have much larger implications. Dogar sees these disruptions as indicative of future threats. “There could be much more critical things, like the electricity grid.

If an attack like this brings that down, it could actually impact people’s lives,” he said. “Or, for example, increasingly we are hearing about critical services like 911 potentially moving to the cloud or to the Internet. Let’s imagine someone is trying to reach 911, but 911 isn’t available because something like this has happened.

The Internet and the Cloud is becoming an integral part of everyone, so I think common users need to be aware of this.”

This concern grows increasingly valid as more and more of the world moves to

the Cloud. Gartner Inc., an information technology research firm, projects that in the next five years over $1 trillion in IT spending will be influenced by the cloud.

Following this trend, the US Department of Homeland Security has made huge shifts towards moving their operations to the cloud, as they strive to be a model of IT excellence.

While having access to Spotify for an afternoon may not seem like a big deal, these Internet disruptions have much larger implications.

Ming Chow, Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science department at Tufts, explained that the blame for these attacks should not be isolated to one single group.

“Everyone is at fault. Certainly the vendor. And now the devices are being recalled. Users for not changing default passwords. Developers and educators for not putting enough emphasis on cyber securi-

ty. Users for taking technology for granted.

Businesses for churning out products naively. Government for having no idea how to respond. It’s a collective problem.”

Panasonic, Samsung, and Xerox are believed to have manufactured some of the devices that were manipulated to launch the attack. These companies, along with lesser-known ones, had loose security standards. Additionally, legislatures have yet to implement policies that create a safe IoT world. And consumers are uneducated and unaware of the dangers of a router that has weak security.

Dogar sees the need for a pivotal shift in the security of IoT devices. “We need to fundamentally rethink our security model.

We can’t trust every device to be secure, because these devices are coming from so many different sources, from so many different manufacturers that you can’t really trust all of them. And from a non-technical perspective, it’s important to realize that whatever solution we come up with, we need to align the economic incentives with it. It’s usability, it’s economics, it’s policy. All these things have to be in place for the situation to be working.”

Dogar emphasized the significance of an attack of this scale. “Certainly it’s a big alarm for everyone. It could be much worse than this.” Chow also sees the implications as critical. “Imagine if a service, a web service like Facebook or a power plant, goes down—you have no access or no power. How would you feel?”

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Arts & Culture

Writing a Revolution

By Carissa Fleury and Sahar Roodehchi

I

n the days after Donald Trump was elected, a poem trended on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The poem begins, “I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia...” The piece is titled “I Want a President,” and was written by poet Zoe Leonard for a queer feminist publication during the 1992 presidential election. Yet the message of the poem, calling for an unorthodox president, remains salient today, 24 years later.

Anger and sadness for the outcome of the election has spurred calls to action and calls for activist movements.

Activism is typically imagined as political rallies and protests, but the role of literature in liberation movements cannot be left out of this imagining. Just as Leonard’s poem allowed thousands of people to express their discontent with the election of Trump and the American political system, literature and writing have been historically crucial to expressing discontent and calling for change and liberation. At Tufts, many students and professors of color use literature and writing as a means to connect personal histories to political movements.

According to English Professor Natalie Shapero, literature works to “invite the reader to leap into previously unconsidered lives and viewpoints while also recognizing in those lives and viewpoints certain elements of human experience that are common to us all. Essentially, literature can argue for the humanity of each and every person.”

Tufts senior Jonathan Jacob Moore, a Black poet and Founding President of Spoken Word Alliance at Tufts (SWAT), evokes the spirit of the Combahee River Collective—a Black feminist lesbian organization—and their commitment to the phrase “the personal is the political.”

For Moore, writing is important to both his being and his beliefs. “To say writing saved my life is cliché but also not

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entirely true—writing saved the life that it helped make possible, it saved me from (some, not all) of the selves I feared becoming,” he said. “Writing is saving my life, but it’s deeper than that. Writing makes sense out of me...it tethers my body to the ground.”

In a world where Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than White people and constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, fear is a daily part of living in the United States while Black. However, Moore cites that writing helps cultivate a space of imagining a world without this fear. “[When] you’re young and Black in a world made for everyone but you, you feel it, hard. But no one holds your hand. You fashion some sense of self, some kind of love, out of what’s left behind. If you’re lucky to have kept your body. If you’re lucky to have space to be. Writing helped me mend the pieces, find things lost, imagine new possibilities.”

Senior Aishvarya Arora, an editor of the on-campus publication NightBrunch and an Asian-American woman who emigrated from India, echoed these points. For Arora, her experiences as a woman of color in the US have constituted her as largely invisible and unseen, and through writing she “feels like [she] can claim [her] identities and see how they are present in [her] life.” Writing was where she first felt comfortable thinking about politics, and where she was able to express how her politics cannot be separated from her identity. “I write so that my sister will have art that reflects her experiences, that helps her make sense of them,” she said. “I write to validate parts of my life that otherwise I’ve been told to ignore or deprioritize.”

Writing can be a way to counter-force silence, according to Arora. She stated, “For marginalized people, every part of your life has silenced your voice. To write is to recover that voice, it can save you and help you understand yourself and your world. That understanding catalyzes change.”

Arts & Culture

Senior Rachel Steindler, an Asian-American woman, transracial, transnational adoptee, and member of the DISRUPT Slam Team, echoed these sentiments. “Writing poetry was first about expressing deep pain and anger that came out of seeing racism and raced sexism,” she said.

“Since then, it has been many things for me: a call for help, a call to action, a demand, a call out, a way to heal, a space to imagine.” She explained that, through writing, she was able to take up space and feel empowered. According to Steindler, “For people of color, writing can be liberation.

Validating the beauty and the importance of one’s own voice can be the most powerful form of self-love, especially when many of our voices have never really been heard.”

Writing can be not only a site for imagination and validation, but also a means to interrupt cycles of violence, especially against people of color. As Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison said at an award ceremony, “I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it’s in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.”

Moore mirrors Morrison’s words: “Writing, as much as it is a process of imagining, I think, is most successful when it demolishes, which is to say imagines excessively and illogically.” To imagine a world where oppression is eradicated, and then to write out this imagining interrupts the idea that violence and injustice will always be the norm, and that freedom is inconceivable. Writers have been doing this for centuries, and, as Morrison references, have been punished for it. Mary Karr, a poet at the New Yorker, adds to this. She said, “If you ever doubted the power of poetry, ask yourself why, in any revolution, poets are often the first to be hauled out and shot—whether it’s Spanish

Fascists murdering García Lorca or Stalin killing Mandelstam. We poets may be crybabies and sissies, but our pens can become nuclear weapons.” This fear, and subsequent violence against poets and writers, reflects that writing is a powerful and necessary force in social movements, as both a means of knowledge production and validation that oppression is, in fact, real and tangible. Morrison finishes by saying that “[writing] is a dangerous pursuit...You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.”

Arora speaks to this importance, not only in the production of literature and poetry, but also in the consumption of it. She said, “If reading and consuming art helps you understand another identity that isn’t your own, helps you know why you need to have an investment in a moment you didn’t before think was relevant to you—that’s great too. For me, the moments I have felt most propelled to action is after reading work by radical thinkers and poets. Who and what we read become the voices in our head.

We need writers in social movements so that the voices in our head challenge us, make us invested in and accountable to acting.”

Thus, writing allows for the understanding and imagining of alternatives. Through literature and poetry, writers like Steindler, Arora, and Moore are able to imagine lives outside of and beyond oppression and forced silence.

In writing, there is the capacity and catalyst for great change and the refusal to accept society as it is. According to Moore, writing encompasses this refusal: “There is no sense of Black imagination that makes sense—the only thing I’d say that makes sense to imagine as a Black person is dying, escaping the matrix. But I’ve decided that’s not an option for me. So here I am, writing. Once you decide what you will refuse to imagine, for example, living the good life as a venture capitalist, the floodgates open. The real work begins.”

“For people of color, writing can be liberation.”

ART BY ANNIE ROOME

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Poetry

It Rotted In Her Belly Grasped a fistful from a recently cut bag of rocket salad and I was caught in the sweet viscous fingers of rot. What is the word for an orange stone fruit that somewhere under its film skin had started to burst into a different black fruit?

That summer I could have convinced myself that it was a syllable-less groan or that you could call the follicular cabbage with a the dark curl on its ear or a new softness in the transparent layers of its concentric heart by the same name. My mother cooks subzhi that drove here some hundreds of miles so I could freeze it. The freezer is where I put things I want so badly I can not bear to see them here in front of me already, now. I can stopper the daily radius of rot with keen ice and modern humming technology

and I can be convinced that in the yellow lurch of the water

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and oil plastering their crystals to the walls of the ziplock, that in the cells, actually the rot has already taken hold, mitochondria and blip of nuclei new with a technicolor not their own. As though matter hadn’t always been churning to splotch, when I was younger and didn’t think to worry about mold, my mother would keep the potatoes and onions through the floor below the kitchen, in a plastic basket in the basement. This taught me the decadence of necessities. I stood watching when the small purple mass of my potatoes—kept in a kitchen in a separate house—began to soil, its green shoots the first time I had seen mold growing into something I could recognize, a new root I could rebury in earth’s loam that would catastrophize itself under the ground too, growing into another stem for rot.

By Aishvarya Arora

ART BY NINA HOFKOSH-HULBERT

From the Kids

by Luca Eisen

I think that growing up in New York you get such a wild range of experiences and exposure to so many things both wonderful and horrible from such a young age that it imprints on your soul. It’s something words can’t describe, something you only get if you grew up here. People who move here may say they get it but will never know. The sounds, the smells, the recurring characters have simultaneously been constant and comforting since my birth but also ever changing. However, in that change there is a consistency that cannot be captured or explained. It’s just something you subconsciously understand if you’re born and raised there.

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Prose

the first time i came back after moving out, ma was devastated that we no longer bled at the same time. we bled together for 9 years, 9 years i spent hating her and the way the moon tied us together; of hoarse throats and flashing eyes and hard fucking pills to swallow. that unperturbed pulse crawling, cough drops, charcoal, and mist, together, together, bolted. steel silent dislocated bodies: i fled california and left her, her insides hollow, where i once lay, silk marrow denigrated. now when i go home my mother no longer bleeds the way i do. it is scarce and painful and inextricably familiar, like our time together, some thorn on a rotting rosebud. i’m bleeding now, and every time my mom bleeds, she wonders if it’s the last time, and i don’t think she actually feels any relief. i wonder what we will have in common anymore, her absolved, my insides shedding themselves.

By Tiara Bhatacharya

ART BY RACHEL CUNNINGHAM

December 5, 2016

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17

OUR ARCHIVES

Campus

By Ben Kesslen

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Campus

W

hen junior Paris Sanders’ professor wanted her class on women in the 1950s to do a project on the history of civil disobedience at Tufts, she and her classmates were told to look to Tufts Digital Collections and Archives (DCA). Housed in the basement of Tisch Library and home to over 4,300 cubic feet of records, the DCA is a highly useful resource little-known among students.

“It was really valuable to see the material we were studying have a tangible history at Tufts, even if it was disheartening to see dorm guidelines that required women to have dates signed in up until 1962,” said Sanders.

Dan Santamaria, Director of the DCA and the University Archivist for Tufts, agrees. Santamaria, who came to Tufts a little over two years ago, said through the archives “you can learn something every day about almost anything that you are interested in.”

Santamaria sees one of the DCA’s main functions—beyond the quotidian research and fact-finding tasks they do for the administration—as a way to “connect students to the history of [Tufts], and the people who came before them.”

In his mind, this is important for all students—particularly for students with marginalized identities. “I think being at a college or university like Tufts can be an isolating experience sometimes, I mean for everyone, but especially if you are member of a group that isn’t as represented within the larger student community,” he said. Santamaria sees the archives as a place in which students might be able to locate themselves when representation feels difficult or even impossible to find.

Freeden Oeur, a professor in the Sociology Department, has found the DCA to be “an especially wonderful resource” for his course, the Sociology of Higher Education.

He sees the archives as a way for his students to get a more complete sense of Tufts’ past.

Oeur said, “Because we’re so used today to widely available digital content, it’s kind of exhilarating to read and analyze letters composed with a typewriter, internal memos, private notes, and the like—all these complex parts that make up a larger university consciousness thinking through its place in a constantly changing social world.”

Oeur’s statements are echoed by Santamaria, who stressed how useful the DCA can be to understand our school’s past. “You can learn about what an institu-

ART BY BEN AVERILL

tion values from what is in the archives… like how curriculum developed over time and what the university thought was important to teach, how land was acquired or when they thought it was important to build buildings or dorms.” Santamaria also added that the archives could help us better understand current campus events.

For example, the archives contain history of how Tufts treated custodial staff and compensated workers, which could inform student activism and contextualize current campus policies.

Archives can also help inform what an institution historically has not valued—what a university chose to put in its archives speaks to what they wanted preserved and remembered. Santamaria said Tufts is no exception to this. While Tufts has admitted Black students since the late 19th century, Santamaria added that that “type of demographic information was not deemed important or useful to capture at that time.” The DCA, Santamaria, the six other staff members who work there, as well as the many Black faculty, staff, and alumni who started the effort to document Black life and history at Tufts, are now working to rectify this gap in the archive.

This is some of the daily work DCA staff finds themselves involved in.

The DCA also contains documents that speak to the racism endemic to Tufts’ history, such as past newspapers that discuss blatant racism casually. An excerpt from a Tufts Weekly article on “Baby Parties” found in the archives from May 13, 1925 describes sophomores at Jackson (the women’s college within Tufts) who played the role of “torturers,” and “roved around” campus dressed up as Ku Klux Klan members. The DCA also holds records of events like the Horrible Parades, where during the 19th and early 20th century, White Tufts students would march around campus in blackface and yellowface. On the subject Santamaria said, “It’s our job to document what happened, and to provide equitable

access to the material we have. We want to document [the Horrible Parades], and make it available to people.” The DCA and its records can be a tool to help us confront Tufts’ past, rather than simply store it away.

Another way the DCA might lend itself to students is its role in preserving institutional memory. Because students only inhabit this campus for a short time, group memory can be quickly lost and forgotten.

Santamaria hopes this is a place the DCA could step in. “If you are interested in something, and you are trying to change something…it probably means there are going to be a lot of people in the future that are interested in your work…so we want to try to capture that,” Santamaria said. DCA staff encourages student groups to both use archives to better understand their institution and the work done before them, and even wants student groups to put their own work in the archives.

Beyond these resources that the archives provide, many students go to the DCA simply for research purposes. Sophomore Audrey Falk, recounted a successful experience where the archivists were “super helpful,” and that doing archival research helped her “understand how societal issues…have played out at Tufts in the past.” However, some students, like junior Ray Bernoff, did describe some difficulty in finding the research he needed for his project on hazing and initiation rituals at Tufts before the 1960s. While this is often natural in archival research, Santamaria says the DCA is really dedicated to “lowering barriers to accessing this material.” The DCA hopes to work on increasing transparency, making sure everything they have is described online, implementing a system so students can more easily find digitized work, and refining their request system.

These changes will only serve to benefit students. Santamaria emphasized just how much students can learn from coming to the archives, knowledge that extends beyond Tufts. “Archival research…helps you develop a lot of analytical critical thinking skills,” he explained. “When you are actually doing archival research you are just confronted with all the stuff that got created, the raw evidence of people’s lives and work…you really need to look at it and analyze it and…figure out what they were trying to accomplish, what their motivations were… I think developing those skills are really valuable in today’s world.”

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Tech & Innovation

Robots & Rugrats Incorporating Technology in Early Childhood Curriculum

By Jordan Lauf

I

t’s time for announcements at the Mystic Learning Center in Somerville, and almost immediately one student is sent to the time-out table for refusing to get off her phone. During computer time, a group of eight year olds gather around to watch Fetty Wap music videos, giggling and hiding the screen from their supervisors, while other kids exercise by playing Just Dance on the center’s Wii. Once homework time rolls around, the staff members are hounded by kids waving cellphones in their faces, begging to call their parents to take them home early. In short, go to any classroom or afterschool center today, and it is impossible to escape the prevailing influence technology has on the kids there.

The question, then, is not whether technology is having an impact on children growing up in the 21st century.

Rather, it is whether this influence can be a positive one.

DevTech, an interdisciplinary research group run by Tufts Professor Marina Umaschi Bers and housed on Tufts’ campus, seeks to ensure that this impact is beneficial. In a little office space filled with colorful toys located in the Child Development building, the lab develops technologies for children in pre-Kindergarten through second grade that seek to teach skills such as coding and engineering from an early age. “In our lab we focus on something called the positive technological development approach that’s looking at what are the strategies we can use to foster positive development and positive behaviors amongst 20

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children… so collaboration, communication, community building, things of that nature,” said Amanda Sullivan, the Early Childhood Teacher Certificate Program Associate Director at DevTech.

One of DevTech’s major products is KIBO, a wooden robotics kit for young children that allows them to create a sequence out of blocks and scan the codes to make the robot move in the way they have instructed. The toy looks and feels very much like a standard childhood plaything, with the added bonus of teaching kids coding and sequencing without increasing their screen time. Their other key project is an app called Scratch Jr., which practices the same skills but in a digital format. With each of these products, there is an emphasis on creative expression as well as fostering technological skills. “KIBO doesn’t look like anything until the child puts their own imagination on it,” said Sullivan. “We also think of it not just as teaching these technology and engineering and coding concepts but as a means of self-expression, just like a blank canvass or a wad of clay.”

DevTech’s successful use of technology in early childhood development provides an instructive alternative to addictive games like Candy Crush.

Yet not all technological products and media aimed at children have the intentionality of DevTech’s work. It is impossible to ignore the incredibly easy access children now have to a world of media and gaming that was previously less available to them. A 2013 study done by Com-

mon Sense Media found that 72 percent of children under the age of eight have used a smartphone or a tablet, a dramatic increase from the 38 percent that had reported using them in a study done by the same group in 2011. While it is possible for parents to control some of the content that their children are able to access on these devices, greater internet availability and more hours of screen-time could increase the risk of children being exposed to ageinappropriate content.

What’s more, in a media environment that often lacks diversity and nuanced perceptions of different identities, increased media consumption at a young age can shape the way children see their world.

“There is some research suggestive of a relationship between heavy media use by children and stereotypical views of gender, race, ethnicity, and age,” wrote Child Development Senior Lecturer Julie Dobrow in an email. This lack of representation has

PHOTOS COURTESY OF DEVTECH WEBSITE

Tech & Innovation

other consequences; Professor Dobrow noted research by psychologist Sheryl Browne Graves which suggests that Black and Hispanic children are disproportionally affected by the lack of positive representation of those who look like them in the media.

Sullivan agrees that not all technology used by young children is beneficial, especially in regards to their social development. “I think there’s always the risk in a home setting that technology is used as a babysitter, and so it can sometimes replace authentic experiences and interactions you could have with a parent or a babysitter or caregiver or your peers when you’re just handed a phone or an iPad with media for you to consume,” said Sullivan. “I think that not all screen time is created equally… when you’re thinking about giving your young child a limited amount of screen time, you want that screen time to be quality, and not just something that’s passive

“When you’re thinking about giving your young child a limited amount of screen time, you want that screen time to be quality, and not just something that’s passive, that’s not engaging them on a deeper level.” that’s not engaging them on a deeper level.”

When kids are consumed by what Sullivan refers to as “passive” technological experiences, they can become more antisocial and less willing to leave the world of their game or TV show to interact with those around them.

What Sullivan and the DevTech team would like to see instead is an increase in technologies such as KIBO and Scratch Jr., which both engage children in learning concrete skills and encourage collaboration with their peers. “The types of technology we develop, computational thinking tools, allow children to be creators of their digital experience rather than consumers,” said Sullivan.

She recounted one instance in which an elementary school teacher used KIBO to enhance her annual unit on the Iditarod, the Alaskan dog-sled race, by tasking the children to program their robots to

complete a relay race passing fake medicine across the classroom floor. DevTech envisions stories like this to become the norm—a future in which technology is incorporated in the classroom in an organic way, a natural addition to the early childhood curriculum.

Because children’s use of technology can reap both positive and negative effects, it is perhaps incumbent on adults and researchers like those at DevTech to make sure the technology that kids are using is both appropriate and instructive. “Tools are just tools, and it’s all about how the adults use them when you’re talking about young children,” said Sullivan. “It’s on the ownership of the adult more so than the ownership of the tool, be it a video game or a coding application or a robotics kit, to think about when and how exactly you’re implementing the tool to get the outcome that you want.”

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Opinion

Standing On Broken Values

By Layla Rao

A

looming Trump presidency marks the end of the colorblind fallacy that flourished in the wake of the 2008 election, Obama as a symbol of “postracial� America. Although Greek organizations have become easy targets as last vestiges of institutional racism in an otherwise racially egalitarian society, it is more accurate to treat them as the embodiment of the pervasive, dominant culture, as opposed to the exception. I do not mean to liken Greek individuals to Trumpists. For others to do so would overlook my perspective as a biracial woman in a sorority. However, the White Supremacist values that both the organizations and political campaign were founded upon should not remain invisible, and to uncover these histories may mean to understand these value systems are not so different at their core. Although degrees of blatancy may differ, it is crucial to contextualize our campus culture within the nationwide dominant narrative because divorcing the two would grant us false immunity. I very much acknowledge the bubble we live in

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on the hill, but branding ourselves progressive is not the same as achieving social equality, and it is not a state of being we should feel contented with.

From the founding of the first fraternity in 1776 until after World War II, Greek organizations were populated by the dominant portion of enrolled college students: White, male, Christians. As the demographics of colleges became less homogenous, particularly after the Civil War and as a result of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, many more predominantly White fraternities were founded in order to resist race and class diversity. These organizations acted as a means to separate the White aristocratic students from the remainder of the increasingly diversified student population, even incorporating racially discriminatory clauses into their constitutions. By the end of the 1960s, as blatant discrimination became less acceptable, these exclusionary clauses were eliminated. Although Greek constitutions are no longer group-restrictive based on race, the organizations themselves remain

Opinion

predominantly White, and perhaps a more harmful effect, are implicitly aligned with White ideals.

Considerable social reform has taken place across Greek organizations since their inception. However, Greek societies are still racialized as White—Whiteness dominates in demographics, culture, and history. To belong to these organizations means to adhere to a standard of White conformity. These organizations are still exclusive as a result of their freedom to admit whomever they choose, and often times these distinctions are based on how good of a “fit” members are. This filtration—on the basis of how closely the value systems and viewpoints of prospective members align themselves with the beliefs of the organization—limits possibility for growth and diversity, regardless of stated intention. Additionally, because backgrounds and perspectives of members are often times similar, misguided narratives may collectively emerge. Because these spaces are currently and historically White, the groupthink that arises is dominated by White voices. It is human nature to believe in the trueness of one’s opinions, especially when those opinions are reflected back by the people one surrounds themselves with.

Therefore, diversity of mind is incredibly important in order to facilitate meaningful learning and growth, a quality many cohesive organizations and communities lack.

Furthermore, the emergence of harmful dominant narratives and standards for behavior and speech, backed by social capital in the case of Greek organizations, can be particularly alienating to those left

unprotected by the status quo. Our campus norms should not be determined by singular groups of like-minded individuals, especially groups that have historically erased the voices of marginalized identities. Although, idealistically speaking, I would like to believe that the inclusion of non-White identities across Tufts Greek organizations signifies dedication to social equality, it is clear this is not fully the case. Regardless of identity, an adherence to normative White standards is required in order to experience a sense of belonging, and for many non-White individuals this means performed assimilation.

Still, non-White individuals are often tokenized, becoming forced examples of diversity in an effort to conceal obvious Whiteness. While this tokenization might not be intentional, the process leads to the subconscious “othering” of those not representative of the majority. The level of comfort an individual feels within these spaces seems to be correlated with their willingness to endorse widely accepted social conventions, encouraging a homogenization of perspective that treacherously descends into cult mentality.

I truly believe—because I have seen a transformation in myself this semester— that students intentionally involved in these communities are not engaged because they are against social justice, but because the consolidation of White power that these organizations promote goes unnoticed and undiscussed. For the past three semesters, I have enjoyed the social benefits my organization has afforded me with little regard for whose voices are missing, or excluded,

To fellow members of organizations rooted in and responsible for perpetuating exclusionary practices, we are implicated in social discrimination whether we choose to acknowledge our personal roles or not.

ART BY CONRAD YOUNG

from these spaces. However, lack of awareness, or intention, has no mitigating effect on contribution to social stratification, and does not absolve me of complicity. It has been difficult to both confront the ways in which my personal actions are antithetical to my political beliefs and to acknowledge the parts of my own identity as a biracial individual that I have had to suppress in order to feel connected to these spaces.

Still, I do not believe this campus is as polarized between Greeks and non-Greeks in ideology as some may assume, but I am certain we are divided by the degrees to which we have chosen to politicize our lives and how eager we are to reinforce the existing structures of social hierarchy.

It is not my intention to attack or defend engagement in Greek organizations, or to push an agenda of abolition. Truthfully, this is because I have no better ideas than have already been proposed. It is my hope that we, as a united campus, are inspired toward change, not because we have publicly shamed one another or pointed fingers toward individuals who have perpetuated greater injustices, but because we acknowledge that it is not okay to go on existing as we do today. Although our respective identities position us within society in dramatically different locations, considerable harm has been done to all of us. We have all internalized the same value system influenced by race, gender, and sexuality as opposed to values derived from human empathy and compassion. We have all seen the dominant culture embrace racism or stand silent in the face of oppression.

Now, it is all of our work to rectify our community. However, it is especially important for those occupying positions of power to no longer remain complacent. To fellow members of organizations rooted in and responsible for perpetuating exclusionary practices, we are implicated in social discrimination whether we choose to acknowledge our personal roles or not. We should all be angry and saddened enough, whether we are negatively or positively impacted, to mobilize for change, because these changes are only possible when we all decide, together, that the current norms are no longer compatible with our objectives.

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News

Checking In or Checking Out? The Standing Rock Check-Ins and the Debate Over Facebook Activism

By Liza Leonard and MT Snyder

O

n Monday, October 31, Tufts students noticed something different on their Facebook newsfeeds.

That morning, many students checked in at Standing Rock Native American Reservation in North Dakota, publicizing their ostensible physical location there. Students had not hopped on a red-eye early Monday morning, but rather had “checked in” at the location on Facebook. Many Facebook users did this because of a claim that Morton County police officers were using location data from Facebook to track people aiming to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and believed that doing so would directly help water protectors by confusing police efforts to target them.

Along with the check-in posts, many people posted a separate note to their Facebook friends explaining the specific guidelines of how to share a location at Standing Rock effectively with instructions such as, “Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check in at Standing Rock, ND, 24

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and to overwhelm and confuse [law enforcement]” and “copy paste to share clarification messages (like this one) because making it public blows our cover.” Some of these posts called on other users to create similar statuses, framing it as “something you should be doing.” Although the origin of the generic shared post was unknown, many people copied and pasted a similar message to post as their status.

“Checking in” at Standing Rock prompted many to consider their role in this type of social media activism. In the days after the onslaught of check-ins, the conversation changed. Though the checkins were designed to protect those protesting on the ground at Standing Rock, some questioned if they were actually helping.

On Monday, October 31, at 1:28 p.m., the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department wrote on their Facebook page, “The Morton County Sheriff ’s Department is not and does not follow Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location. This claim / rumor is absolutely false.”

Even though the department claimed not to follow Facebook check-ins for information about protestor locations, over one million people shared their location at Standing Rock, according to The Guardian. This number included many Tufts students according to location statistics on Facebook. Whether or not this information disrupted police surveillance, it created a new visibility of the issue on campus and beyond. Some students felt that their Facebook activism helped to a certain extent in bringing this visibility, while others chose not to check-in because of doubt in its efficacy. Students’ choices to check-in highlighted how often visible internet activism can be tied to social capital.

On October 28 and 29, the Departments of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies hosted a teach-in for Standing Rock “on the protective actions at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline.” Cecilia Petit, a senior and coorganizer of the Standing Rock teach-in, attributed some of the success of the teach-

ART BY JAKE ROCHFORD

News in to the hashtag activism panel led by Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy. Petit noted how the panel was exceptionally well-attended, in part due to the teach-in running behind the planned schedule so students who were assigned to go to a later panel ended up listening to Dr. Baldy, who “implored everyone to check in and everyone did.”

“I woke up the next morning and all across my Facebook feed people were checking in at Standing Rock,” said Petit.

“One little moment on campus started this crazy fire.”

Petit stated that during the hashtag activism panel, Dr. Baldy explained how Facebook check-ins are a tool that have been used by police to issue warrants for people with criminal charges, but perhaps more importantly, hashtag activism and online engagement show public and measurable solidarity. Using Twitter’s hashtags and Facebook check-ins for activism provide the “ability for people who can’t necessarily get themselves there to be participating intrinsically, a part of this movement even from far away,” said Petit.

As Petit referenced, online activism can play an important role in making a movement more widely accessible. In an article on the Huffington Post, Sabina Khan-Ibarra points out, “Social media is a more accessible way of activism for those who cannot leave the home,” citing “individuals with certain disabilities, caretakers, and those with young children” as some of the people online activism can include.

Beyond those who were present at the panel, other Tufts students also checked in. Bruce Johnson, a junior majoring in environmental studies, explained that he checked in for two main reasons. He wanted to stand in solidarity with the people at Standing Rock, whether or not the police were using data from Facebook. He also explained that he was trying to bring awareness to the issue on a highly visited platform. “I’ve been trying to share more articles that relate to environmentalism,” he said. “I think that’s one of the best way to get people of our generation to notice things. People spend a ridiculous amount [of time] on Facebook, myself included.”

Johnson expressed his belief that sharing information on his social media accounts is worthwhile in that it will bring awareness to causes he thinks are important to his friends as well as decision makers.

He was hopeful, and believes that “politi-

cians make decisions based on what people want. And showing that a large amount of people care about a certain issue is one of the best ways to get something done.”

Nick Cunetta, a sophomore, also checked in at Standing Rock as a statement of solidarity with the water protectors. He thinks that checking in was a good way to show his support for the protests, albeit not a perfect one. “That type of engagement can be kind of surface level if all you are doing is saying you are there on Facebook,” he said. “But that is some level of engagement that’s better than disengaging.” He said that the large number of check-ins could prompt further thinking and work on the issue.

But Cunetta acknowledged that Facebook activism is often superficial. “Yes, it is lazy to a degree, because all the people that checked in aren’t necessarily boarding

“Checking in” at Standing Rock prompted many to consider their role in this new type of social media activism. buses to go out to North Dakota right now, but there are other results of this,” he said.

Cunetta hopes that people will be more versed on the issues, and “the next time they go to vote, they have this in mind, and they think it’s more important to protect native land.”

On the wother hand, some students, including senior Bruno Olmedo, chose not to check in but still engaged in the online dialogue surrounding the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement. Olmedo thought the checkins “sounded convincing enough” but said, “When I was fact checking, I was more trying to figure out why it was confusing the police officers technologically; what in the software would do that? And found that it actually doesn’t do anything.”

Olmedo, whose family’s land was taken by the Bolivian government, believed the check-ins showed solidarity, but he encouraged tangible action. “Doing things that are truly going to help people on the ground instead of just checking in and just being like ‘did my duty,’ because the people there need more support than just a checkin to defend their land.” He expressed his concern over slacktivism—engagement with social movements requiring little time or effort—noting, “In the end, everyone was trying to support however they could, but it’s unfortunate that a lot of this remote activism is sometimes misguided because even though checking in was good and probably ended up raising awareness and funds…I’m afraid that for some people it was enough.”

Howard Woolf, the director of the Experimental College and a professor of Film and Media Studies, is less skeptical of people using social media simply as a form of slacktivism. He is passionate about social media’s power for good. In terms of facilitating social movements, he said social media’s ability to organize people is “revolutionary.” Woolf explained, “Many people would say that’s how Obama was elected. And certainly the Occupy movement used it extensively. Even the anti-Trump rallies had millions of people, literally, all over the country coordinating their efforts using social media.”

However, some may use check-ins and other forms of online activism to gain social capital and Woolf recognizes that being visibly active in causes can be “a way of aggrandizing yourself, or creating this image of yourself as being important and cool,” but he also notes that these “tendencies have been there forever in political activism.” Woolf believes that social media did not create a new desire for people to be recognized. He says, “I think of social media as an amplifier.”

While the Facebook check-ins directed campus dialogue to the protests at Standing Rock, the phenomenon of checking-in was short-lived, as is often the case in the cycle of remote activism.

Petit questioned this: “There should be a question of, why has it just now become an exciting issue? Why haven’t [dominant institutions and predominantly White institutions] been talking about the land assaults all across the country that have been occurring since 500 years ago?”

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Opinion

Finding Home

By Muna Mohamed

H

ome is a strange place. It’s a call to action, a call out from colonizers, a catcall from the boy who thinks it’s cute to guess your ethnicity. Home is a place of familiarity and unfamiliarity, of going home during breaks and feeling more homesick after each visit.

When people ask me where I am from, I can never tell what information they are actually searching for. Like, where do I live? Where was I born? Where is my family originally from? And no answer is ever enough—not Maine, the place I moved to after an influx of Somali immigrants from Atlanta, Georgia. Not Georgia, although I wish knowing the A-Town Stomp and visiting Centennial Park as a child was enough to call that place home. Not Somalia, the warrior country USANews reports as one of the most broken nations in the world today. “Where are you from?” is not always a simple question. Some people call it diaspora, call it subtle effects of colonialism, call it “you’re so confusing” when you don’t give them the answer they are looking for.

So, what do you really mean when you ask, “Where are you from?”

Sometimes, people are asking for the place that you currently reside in, where you spent your childhood but moved away from three years ago, or that you long for when you are homesick. People are looking for a simple answer, but forget to see how much of a complicated concept home can be. It is not a privilege on its own to 26

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think of home and where one is from in such a simplistic, banal way—but it can be a part of the privilege people carry that allows them to remain unaware of the assumptions and aggressions that come hand in hand with asking someone where they are from.

Where are you from?—The pick up line. I don’t know what book some people are getting their tricks out of, but guessing someone’s ethnicity or nationality is not cute. The problem isn’t in the guessing itself—although that has its own implications—it’s in the fetishization and exoticism that the asker’s intentions are usually rooted in.

Where are you really from?—The assumption. Can also be asked as, “No, like, where are you from from?” And that really and from is always said in such an invasive, sharp tone. Usually, this is asked the second time when your first answer wasn’t what the asker was looking for /or/ didn’t satisfy the asker. And when you choose to give the bare minimum, to say that random city or state, when you let the question win and hope for the best in the asker’s intentions, this question is just the reminder that no matter what you say or represent or ride for, your answer is not enough. It is another way of saying, “Why are you here?” and “You don’t belong here.”

Where are you from?—The trauma.

Yes, home can be a place of safety and protection for some people. But for others, home can carry a whole lot of sadness, loss, and trauma. Home can be a war zone, can be a place one can never return to, can be a place one needs to leave. Sometimes, asking where one is from can trigger bad

memories and act as a reminder of all that one has lost. Anna Rodriguez, a sophomore, says, “The ‘where are you from?’ question also holds trauma for some people and a lot of people don’t realize that. In my hood growing up (and still sometimes today), if you were asked where you were from, it was your sign to run.”

Instead, people have chosen to start using “Where is home?” as the more conscious, open way of asking where one is from (or just writing the latter instead).

But even then, people are always either looking for a city and state, an origin, a broad geographic area we call home. As Taiye Selasi put so beautifully, “The myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories.” And for those of us who fall in between the cracks, who are torn by borders and between nations, who feel confused and complicated with our relationship to home, we are left to give an answer that fails to say anything real or substantive about who we are.

But what do you really learn when you ask, “Where are you from?”

My frustration with home stems from this belief that where you are from must define who you are, rather than your experiences. It is a meek attempt at knowing someone’s story, and doesn’t apply the same way to everyone. To some people, “Where are you from?” is as simple of a question as “What is your name?” There are people ART BY ANNIE ROOME

Opinion

who can look you straight in the eye and confidently recite the name of that small town in Vermont that they so proudly represent, that they wear on their sleeve and fly flags of on their cars. There are people who have never been ridiculed or questioned about the quarters they have always called home. But to some of us, answering the question is always followed with a feeling of settling, of never being enough.

Some people live in places that hate them, that don’t want them, and that isolate them.

Some people live in places that do not exist anymore. We cannot expect where one is from to define who they are—their experiences do. I live in Maine—and no, I have never been snowboarding. My family doesn’t go camping, and I saw a lighthouse for the first time two years ago. Ironically, my most common childhood memory is of white neighbors telling my family to go back to where we came from. I am not Maine, and Maine is not me.

Don’t get me wrong—where you are from or live can be a place pivotal to your life and experiences. And, personally, I

love the love some people have for their hometowns/cities/countries (homes?). In Jamila Woods’ song Heavn, she sings, “you gotta love me like I love the lake, you wanna love me better love the lake”—alluding to Lake Shore Drive, the freeway which runs parallel to Lake Michigan. This type of love is so beautiful, so underrated, and so romantic. It is a love I both admire and envy (mashallah). “Where are you from?” might excite these same people—I mean, how many times have people used, “I’m from ______ don’t play with me!” as their defense? And that narrative and story may stick true to people with those experiences, and it is through those experiences that define who you are—not the place that you live in.

So, where do you call home?

Home is a strange place. But it doesn’t need to be—as my soul-sister poet fav Safia Elhillo says, “Where I’m from is where I’m from and not where I was

put.” Instead of allowing this question to be used as a tool to define you, and making yourself feel insufficient when you give an answer they weren’t looking for, remember that wherever home is to you, whether it’s your comfy brown couch you crash on when you visit your big family on school breaks, or the basketball court you felt most free in, or that small town in Vermont you rep proudly, is enough.

And if home is a place of complication, if home is not merely a place for you, if home is a feeling you are still searching for, home can be just that. So when people ask you “Where are you from?” or “Where is home?” tell them everything. Tell them nothing. Hit that A-Town Stomp. Speak in a different dialect. Talk about your family. Sing them a song off of Jamila Woods’ album HEAVN. And as the wonderful Audre Lorde once said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I’d be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Don’t become their fantasy, and remember: you define yourself before any question or answer that follows.

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Profile

In Central Square, right next to an outbound T-Stop, is an alley in which artists are able to paint and create freely. This space is frequented by local artists and tourists alike. Karl Stephan, a Boston-based art teacher, photographs the alley every day.

Profile

In Central Square, right next to an outbound T-Stop, is an alley in which artists are able to paint and create freely. This space is frequented by local artists and tourists alike. Karl Stephan, a Boston-based art teacher, photographs the alley every day.

Karl Stephan 28

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December 5, 2016

How did you start all of that?

There are very few legal places for people to paint in public in Boston, and this is one of them. I’ve been documenting it, with photographs, for about six years. Isn’t that beautiful!

So it’s always changing?

It’s always changing, it’s changing now.

What brought you to this spot?

About six years ago, I took a studio about a block and a half from here. So I’ve been coming through here every day—I’ve got hundreds, probably thousands of pictures.

People come from all over the world to paint here. One of the things I realized from my own work is that you see a lot of overlapping things happening on the wall.

You‘ll find little weird connections and interesting things happen at the intersection of pieces, like this moon-rabbit-sun that is left over from ten days ago, and they just haven’t painted up that high to cover it, but a hint of the Easter egg from back a few weeks ago peeks through.

What draws you to this spot?

It’s free, it’s original, it’s voluntary, it’s for the most part people from the community—but people come from other parts of the world because it’s kind of a known spot. A lot of the big names have been through here, and The Kings and Queens of Boston Street all come here. So in the process of taking these photographs I’ve

had the chance to get to meet people and get to know them.

What is your personal history with art?

I was so absorbed in art in college I didn’t even think about what I was going to do after. So when I graduated I was like okay, well I need a job, I got married and had two kids, and I stopped making art for 20 years.

Why did you start painting again?

After 9/11, I bought an easel and started painting every day. It just felt right. I did that for years and then decided to leave my job and go back to teach. I started becoming open to a lot more influences and I was completely absorbed again.

What is your favorite part about teaching?

Collaboration. After each session I have students put their extra paint on one blank canvas. It starts off looking like trash but eventually it starts looking kind of cool— we finish it and make a collaborative piece free from restraints of right and wrong.

What makes you passionate about art?

I love how art engages a range of voices from all parts of the community. Just like we saw walking through the graffiti tunnel—the group of children learning to spray paint and interacting with the local regular street artists. I love the way art brings people together.

PHOTO BY EVIE BELLEW

AUDREY FALK

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