Spring 2020 Global Studies Thesis Projects

“It is now widely acknowledged in urban sociology that space reflects and reinforces inequality. Nowhere is this more obviously true and trenchant than in South Africa, where the social, economic and racial divisions of apartheid were spatially constructed.”

– Daniel Schensul and Patrick Heller

Abstract

The structural segregation institutionalized under Apartheid in 1948 excluded Black Africans from being able to access the center of the city, and today’s dense informal settlements continue to showcase the legacies of apartheid-era city planning laws. Even though Apartheid was abolished 25 years ago, the impact it created through spatial exclusion against poor Black Africans remains alive today. Since such individuals live the furthest away from the city, access to public transport is key to move throughout the urban area, and access vital centers of employment, health, and education. In Cape Town, informal taxis are the main mode of transport for slum dwellers, as showcased by this investigation’s case study of five young slum dwellers. Through participant observation, interviews, and the journals of five youth that form part of a media collective in Cape Town, Know Your City TV, this investigation seeks to shed light on how young community members of various informal settlements across the urban area view the current transport system they interact with on a daily basis. Through the different lenses of affordability, accessibility, safety, and reliability, this investigation reflects on how the public transport system could evolve to better serve the needs of the urban poor and create a more equitable access to the city.

Abstract

Grounded within critical Indigenous studies, anti-colonial and decolonial theories, and scholarship on migration and diaspora, this paper builds on emerging scholarship that examines the nexuses between these literatures to interrogate the “settler of color”. In doing so, it turns to the term “postcolonial-migrant-settler” to make sense of the unique positionality of migrants who were once colonized subjects, but now make homes and meaning as settlers on Indigenous land. This paper argues for the unique potential of these kinds of migrants to act in solidarity with Indigeonus nations given their own histories of anti-colonial organizing, and to undergo a second stage of decolonization that transforms the postcolonial-migrant-settler to decolonized migrant-guest. This analysis is grounded in Minneapolis, engaging Dakota, Hindu, and Jain onto-epistemologies to make an argument about how the mirroring onto-epistemologies and understandings of land, kinship, and justice between these three groups are a means of understanding relationalality between them, and subsequently as a tool for decolonization. In imagining a template from which to work, this paper examines land-based relationality and resurgence practices being enacted by Pacific Islander migrants and Dakota and Ojibwe community members in Minneapolis. Though focused on a local context, the connections made speak to larger questions about trans-Indigenous organizing and lateral solidarity that are increasingly important given a future of capitalism-driven climate change that intensifies dispossession and creates conditions of displacement. The arguments that are presented are with the main goal of beginning the steps towards being better relatives and mapping a template for material decolonization.

Abstract

When I was living in Florianopolis, Brazil last fall I had the opportunity to join a collective formed by black students at the state university. We discussed race very often. Some of them had opposing experiences of racial identity to me although we looked quite similar. They would sometimes reflect on their discovery of themselves as Black people upon entering university when I had understood myself as Black since childhood. We also often spoke about Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro, who was still campaigning for the presidency at that time. He has publicly denounced the necessity for affirmative action based racial quotas, on multiple occasions. Most of the Black university students that I met were in school based on the same racial quotas whose significance their current president refutes. Racial quotas in Brazil came to fruition during Luiz Inacio (Lula) Da Silva’s presidency in the 2000s along with his inaugural speech, that affirmed the existence of a Black socio-racial group in Brazil as well as the discrimination they endure. I wondered what the impact of a president with views like Bolsonaro might be on the continuation of progress within the Black Brazilian population. I felt that I could truly appreciate the reality of their existence during Bolsonaro’s presidency if I could comprehend more about Black identity in Brazil; I wanted to explore some of the sentiments that had been shared with me at the university. I had never heard anyone express a process of discovering racial identity upon adulthood, prompting me to want to learn about the process of affirming Black identity in Brazil. In this paper I will explore my findings on the process of affirming Black Brazilian identity through the analysis of interviews I conducted with nine Black Brazilian women. The paper will go further to explore the liberating quality of affirming Black identity in Brazil.

2018 Urbanglass sculpture installation titled Raízes (Roots), 2018 by artist Anna Parisi.

Abstract

This thesis serves as an initial investigation of statelessness and the relationship between belonging and citizens in the United States. Does documentation mean protection? Are we protected by the state? Through statelessness, in chapter one, we see the vulnerability of the stateless population on a global scale and are given a glimpse of the reality of everyday statelessness in a developed nation. Statelessness exposes the vulnerabilities of everyday people, regardless of status. This vulnerability is perpetuated by the state through citizenship policies that seize the idea of belonging. In chapter two, citizenship is deconstructed to show the structural inequality. Through acts of citizenship, we identify that belonging does not mean you are a citizen, likewise, a citizen does not always belong. Acts of citizenship allow people to claim their belonging in society through their everyday routines or captivating challenges to the status quo. This repositioning of the citizen allows for a better understanding of belonging and opens the door for all people, especially stateless, to claim their space in a state. This idea is not found in state and international literature on ways to protect the stateless population. In the final chapter, current solutions to citizenship are criticized for not getting to the root of statelessness. Ignoring the structural causes of stateless risks creating a new international identity crisis. In the final section of this paper, we are presented with the deficiencies of this work and identify ways to expand upon the initial research to form a comprehensive understanding of belonging.

Abstract forthcoming.

Abstract

This thesis examines the impact of racism through a multi-layered study of photographic technology from its birth in 1839 through its transition from film to digital equipment. By examining the historical intersection between racism and photography, I clarify its progression by which social movements transform its existence. The time period studied includes the amalgamation of the arts and sciences, the end of colonial rule, the swelling and abolishment of slavery, and the photographic and social disruption of Black political power. I use three major strategies: (1,2) content and object analysis to specifically critique the user, the viewer, and the technology itself and (3) a dialectical inquiry as a form of qualitative research analysis. Research has been collected from libraries at The New School: Parsons School of Design, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, and the New York Public Library, from internships with Velem Studios and Sarah Silver Productions, and published reports that have provided data to complete a comprehensive analysis of wealth disparities among Black and White households. Some view racism as something that is separate from the institution of American society, but this thesis challenges these arguments by distinctly pointing out its relationship to photographic practices. Photography, as practice and object, and technology have individually created independent structures of excellence as we can see living in the age of the technological revolution. This thesis gives a thorough critique of current behavioral patterns involving photographic technology. It doesn’t explain everything about racism and its legacy but it does acknowledge that segregation happened by law, not by natural I occurrence. Therefore, the importance of distinction is necessary to the formulation of this paper.

Abstract

In this thesis, I compare the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to the New Sanctuary Movement started in 2007, to understand how the concept of sanctuary has expanded in New York City, by mapping each of its features and the movements interacting with it. I draw on my personal experience of coming to understand sanctuary and expanded sanctuary through volunteering and interning at New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) as well as organizing with MoMA Divest Coalition in 2019-2020. I focus mainly on the cross-movement coalition between prison abolition and sanctuary because of the rising involvement and influence of the private prison industry in U.S. immigration enforcement and the expansion of the immigration detention system. (Luan 2018) By focusing on the cross-section between immigration and the prison industrial complex, I have been pushed to explore how neoliberal ideologies driving privatization of traditionally public domain have invited private actors to push for a more securitized state, resulting in social and political impacts on the lives of immigrants and Muslims in the U.S. and abroad. (Moreno and Price 2017) My analysis draws from my participation in the New Sanctuary Movement in New York City, and my academic research on notions of political imaginations of solidarity and expanded sanctuary. I hope to translate practice to theory in social movements and vice versa; this will help my reader better understand the reality of sanctuary as it is happening right now through one perspective. Through my involvement with NSC and organizing work with MoMA Divest, I attempt to demonstrate that imaginations of expanded sanctuary may tangibly reach within and beyond immigrant rights organizing spaces. I argue that sanctuary could lead to to cross movement coalitions in solidarity with undocumented people that can address broader structural issues such as detention, deportation, displacement, and dispossession and fight them as part of a larger local/global community.