Month: August 2017

Open Letter of Response to the Closure of Edward Said Search at CSU, Fresno

On April 26th Fresno State abruptly closed the Edward Said search in Middle East Studies (MES). The Administration claimed procedural violations in the search. This claim was made after the search committee had completed all aspects of the search and submitted a rank ordered list of four candidates, all of Palestinian or Arab American ethnicities. The cancellation of the search generated an overwhelming response by academics at the national and international levels. Numerous letters of objection from scholars in Middle East Studies and petitions with over 2500 signatures called into question the action of the administration, asking the university president, Joseph Castro, to reopen and complete the search.

Vida Samiian, one of the authors, who served as Director of the MES program, resigned in objection to this discriminatory closure. In her public letter of resignation, she documented a campaign of pressure on search committee members by Zionist and Israeli state supporters.

UC Democracy: A Manifesto – Demilitarize! Deprivatize! Democratize!

This manifesto is a demand to finally have our voices heard, as well as a call to action to resist the neoliberal forces encroaching on our university that are increasingly present in higher education systems worldwide.

On May 17, 2017, I traveled with a group of students to the University of California Regents meeting in San Francisco. Originally, we had planned to speak in the “public comment” portion of the meeting, in protest against the Board of Regents and the UC Office of the President (UCOP). However, because of strict security measures, few of us spoke at all. Our experiences being silenced and policed are not unusual and reflect a decades-long struggle against corruption in the UC system, alongside worsening conditions of inequity, social injustice, and a lack of transparency.

Shifting Carceral Landscapes: Decarceration and the Reconfiguration of White Supremacy

by Colleen Hackett and Ben Turk

This essay explores the changing contours of white supremacy in the United States, and in particular its relationship to systems of control and confinement. Many critics have illuminated the ways that racial control is inherent to and embedded within the penal system. In light of some of the federal- and state-level reforms that claim to incarcerate less and use more “alternative,” community-based sanctions, we interrogate the ways that white racial interests continue to be secured across the carceral landscape, thus granting official politics limited space to entertain negligible decarceration policies. In this preliminary survey of the carceral landscape, we critique several white-dominant social institutions that work together to confine and control communities of color outside of the prison walls, while reproducing varying forms of racial caste. We incorporate historical understandings of racialization and colonization, as well as contemporary concepts and observations from academia and beyond to highlight the extent of this entrenchment. It is our hope that this survey will address the shape of racialized control in the United States that must be considered when addressing just one of its manifestations—the prison state.