The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 2

INSIDE:

Transformative Justice on college campuses, the recriminilization of indoor sex work in Rhode Island, and the suspect side of dietary supplements

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A Brown/RISD Weekly / September 20, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 02

the

Indy Contents Cover Untitled Eve O’Shea

News 02 Week in Vape Nations Alan Dean & Ricardo Gomez 03 Social Determinants: The DRC Ebola Crisis Jacob Alabab-Moser & Izzi Olive Features 05 Beyond #MeToo Camila Pelsinger

From the Editors To whom it may concern: I’d like to return this issue of the College Hill Independent. How should I address my package? Please advise. I am willing to pay any and all shipping costs, just need it off my hands and out of my house.

12 Cappadocia, and the Places We’ll Go Ella Rosenblatt

Sincerely, EK

Literary 07 The Fourth of July Girl Catherine Habgood 08 Two Poems Alana Baer

Mission Statement

Metro 09 From Decrim to Recrim Victoria Caruso

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

17 Catering Contract Concerns Noa Machover and Nora Lawrence Ephemera 11 The Croissant Brothers Play a Tune Eve O’Shea and Gabe Simon

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

Science + Tech 13 Seeing Through Supplements Jennifer Katz

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Arts 15 Disney to Dust Tristan St. Germain X 18 Home/Land Jorge Palacios

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Sheamus Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

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Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Dana Kurniawan

VOL 39 ISSUE 02

Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Biesntock Pia Mileaf-Patel

MVP Ella Rosenblatt & Christie Zhong *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

BY Alan Dean & Ricardo Gomez ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Christie Zhong

VAPE NATIONS

WEEK IN

CLOUDLESS SKIES ABOVE SALT LAKE CITY the Church’s policies on prescription drugs and their to be conclusive proof of the non-existence of the Loch The emergence of damning new evidence demonstrating the danger of vaping and e-cigarettes feels like a weekly occurrence in 2019, as scientists issue ever more frequent warnings of “wet lung,” “popcorn lung,” and various other lung-related body horror Mad Libs. While this week’s government ban on flavored e-liquids may be the most widely discussed change of fortune for the vape lobby, Big Vape can now count among their enemies another, far more dangerous foe than the paper-pushing bureaucrats at the FDA: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

On August 15, in an article published in its youth outreach magazine New Era, the Church clarified its policy on substances deemed “addictive” and concretely declared that “vaping is clearly against the Word of Wisdom,” a broad category that equally forbids cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, and all other manner of habit-forming substances—foods included.

While a cited study alleged that two-thirds of teen vapers believe themselves to be inhaling nothing but delicious mango flavor “mist,” New Era warns young Mormons that that’s “way, way far from the truth.” This news follows a general shift in the public’s attitude toward e-cigarettes, which have gone from futuristic anti-addiction devices to the child-targeting monsters haunting Melania Trump’s nightmares in a few short years. Though New Era’s statement is only a clarification, the fact that it was considered necessary at all reveals the degree to which vaping is becoming a normalized part of American teenage life, and how regulators and officials fail to find the language to properly discuss—let alone solve—this public health issue. While the Independent is skeptical of the applicability of religious purity-based restrictions to FDA policymaking, it is clear that the current system’s reliance on the moral panics of concerned parents to propel itself into (often haphazard) action is a deeply unsuccessful model.

While the vape crisis seems to be keeping the FDA’s hands more than full, it is hardly the only target in New Era’s scope. As those in danger of straying from the Word of Wisdom are not limited to a handful of carefree teens sneakily passing around a Juul during a bathroom break, the article also used the opportunity to clarify the rules for the Latter-day Saint youth surrounding the forbidden “hot drinks”: coffee and tea.

As with sweet, sugary, seemingly innocuous flavored vapes, young people should be aware that “the word coffee isn’t always in the name of coffee drinks.” The safest method, as tried and tested in other spheres of adolescent life, is, of course, abstinence, with the Church suggesting that one should “never buy drinks at coffee shops,” or if one must buy a drink, at the very least “always ask if there’s coffee in it.” Similarly, it has been declared that “drinks with names that include café or caffé, mocha, latte, espresso or anything ending in –ccino are coffee and against the Word of Wisdom.”

The linguistics of tea are thankfully far less knotty and potentially misleading, but the Church stressed, lest a staple of American drink lead the faithful astray, that “iced tea is still tea.”

Lastly, the article in New Era touches upon the subject of “Marijuana, Opioids” (well known to be a single category). While affirming their forbidden nature, the article unexpectedly leaves the door cracked open for medicinal use “under the care of a competent physician, and then used only as prescribed.” This policy may seem contradictory to the unfamiliar observer, but it is quite consistent with

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legitimate use. Given this background, the Word of Wisdom starts to appear significantly more coherent and common-sense in its approach to unhealthy and addictive substances than a good deal of the FDA, at least insofar as it seems to clearly center the questions of health and addiction. Though the clarity and consistency of the Word of Wisdom is to be appreciated, several questions remain unanswered. For one, the Indy would like to know what a Latter-day Saint youth is to do when prescribed (under the care of a competent physician) a strain of medicinal marijuana with a name like Coffee Haze, Caramel Kona Coffee Kush, or Cappuccino 420?

—AD TO NESSIE, WITH LOVE A boy with weak eyes and a tuft of straw blond, muppetish hair skims a slim stone across the flat water of a Loch Ness inlet. The stone sputters to an unexpected halt where an object emerges from the water. The boy sees a slender, mesozoic marine reptile and, for the briefest moment of bittersweet intensity before the creature retreats back into the gray waters, the boy and the reptile lock eyes, knowing that they have shared something profound and intimate.

That boy may have been Boris Johnson (aka BoJo), the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, who currently has his imagination working overtime as he tries to conjure up belief in both mythical Brexit deals and lake monsters. While visiting Scotland, BoJo was recently asked by journalists to comment on the matter of the Loch Ness monster. The fabled creature is commonly said to be some type of prehistoric reptilian holdover, the last lonely plesiosaur, but new research has emerged showing that no traces of reptilian DNA exist in the water. Indeed, only a high concentration of giant eel DNA could be found. BoJo, being the reputable empiricist that he is, responded with some insightful analysis, saying, “A high concentration of giant eel DNA in the water, that does not seem to me

Ness Monster.” BoJo made it a point to let the journalists know that as a child he had longed to believe that the mythical creature was real, and that, even now, he “yearns to believe” in the Loch Ness Monster.

While Johnson’s explanations of his nostalgia for the mythic creatures that informed his etiological development may have stirred up renewed hope in some like-minded folk, they emerge (unlike Nessie) in the murky midst of a rather concerning lack of progress on any type of Brexit deal. BoJo’s Brexit plans have recently hit some increasingly bumpy waters after outrage over BoJo's decision to suspend Parliament. As of right now, British lawmakers are set to come back together on October 14, just before Brexit’s October 31 deadline. While it might be apt to ask for an extension during a slew of chaos, with giant eel DNA disproving childhood dreams and all, BoJo says that he would rather “die in a ditch” than ask for an extension for Brexit.

There’s a certain method of mythos in BoJo’s belief in Parliament, Brexit, and lake monsters. By law, BoJo would be compelled to ask for an extension if no deal is reached. However, much like he believes in mythical creatures, he also seems to believe that his singular power of will can overcome the laws of the state. There’s a certain formula here that posits that if one had just enough belief in themselves, they could make whatever they wanted come true. A No-Deal Brexit would happen without consequence, BoJo might befriend a couple members of Parliament, and the ole Nessie of BoJo’s dreams would be alive and well. “Why don’t we? Why don’t we?” BoJo pines. “There is so much more we can do,” he told the Sunday Times. “What grieves me about the current approach to Brexit is that we are just in danger of not believing in ourselves, not believing in Britain.” The issue, it seems, is that no one believes quite like BoJo does.

While the existence of the Britain that BoJo believes in probably won’t be disproven by giant eel DNA, the Prime Minister might want to rely on more than just belief to fish out a Brexit deal.

—RG

NEWS

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SOCIAL DETERMINANTS “They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1889)

Looking at headlines and photos today of Western health workers clad in hazmat suits vaccinating local children for Ebola conjures a trope of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a place of disease, instability, and darkness—in contrast to that of the West as the torchbearer of civilization—readily recognizable in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.

This representation seems to transcend the 120 years of colonial rule and the series of independence movements that distance the modern DRC from the Belgian-ruled Congo Free State that Conrad portrayed in his novella.

Today, the DRC is facing the second-largest outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease on record; the DRC Ministry of Health’s latest report puts the total number of cases at 3,130, with 2,096 recorded deaths. The virus has also spread to parts of Rwanda, Uganda, and, as of last week, Tanzania. Six neighboring countries are also at high risk.

As was the case at the time of Conrad’s writing, the West still presides over and bears witness to death in the Congo, yet contemporary Western nations’ relationship to and responsibility for public health crises in the sovereign DRC are far more ambiguous than they were at the dawn of Western imperialism. A status quo of Western patronage and creditorship has continued the extraction of the country’s resources and stalled sustainable development, problems which have resulted in extreme social instability. While many of the social ills in the DRC are traceable to internal corruption and conflict, in a postcolonial republic no part of the contemporary social situation can be understood without colonial context. In this article, Indy News tries to make sense of the ongoing Ebola epidemic and the global health response through the lens of postcolonial critique, raising questions about the West’s role in international health interventions, and by extension, in addressing the underlying social problems that plague former colonies.

A Word of Caution We recognize that by writing about issues in Africa for a sympathetic Western audience we raise awareness but at the cost of reinforcing stereotypes of ‘Africa as victim.’ We write today about this current Ebola outbreak in the DRC because we found it necessary to provide nuanced coverage, but we also recognize that there is more to news coming out of Africa and the Global South than complex issues simplified and sensationalized by Western media outlets.

The Epidemic In late July 2018, four fever cases surfaced in North Kivu, a northeastern province of the DRC which borders both Rwanda and Burundi. Within five days, the DRC Ministry of Health confirmed an outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease, commonly known as Ebola, and initiated an emergency response. In the earliest days of the outbreak, before a vaccine had even been authorized for use in preventing further transmission of the disease, efforts focused on containment: Ebola, which often manifests in flu-like symptoms but also interferes with the body’s blood clotting mechanism, is transmitted via direct contact with bodily fluids of an individual infected with the disease.

The United States’ initial involvement in the outbreak ended nearly as soon as it began. The US Centers

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• • • • • • The DRC Ebola outbreak, explained

for Disease Control (CDC) deployed experts on the disease to North Kivu just days after the outbreak What is Global Health? was declared, only to withdraw them a few days later. So how did we get here? Why are decisions affecting Explaining this reversal in a testimony delivered to the the lives of millions in the DRC being made in bureauHouse Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global cracies thousands of miles away in DC or Geneva?

Human Rights, and International Organizations, CDC We can roughly trace the beginnings of the internaDirector Robert R. Redfield cited “security concerns.” tional health regime to 1948, when the World Health The withdrawal applied to other US government Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations, personnel in the DRC, too: at the same time, the State was formed. The organization is aspirationally interDepartment reduced its staff in Kinshasa, the national national in that its constitution claims “the health of all capital. Redfield attributed this move to escalating peoples is fundamental,” yet its interventions toward violence between rival political factions in advance of providing global health solutions have been underthe December 2018 DRC presidential election, testi- mined historically by the lack of cooperation from fying that “several areas of the country experienced a countries that host or donate to the WHO, and its own deterioration in the overall security situation.” bureaucratic structure, which has been criticized for As Redfield’s quote suggests, the global health being overly centralized and slow-acting. response was hindered by a climate of incredible Moreover, we should consider that the majority violence that has characterized life in North and of funding it receives comes from donors from the South Kivu provinces for decades. A report published West, with the United States, the Bill & Melinda in August by NYU’s Congo Research Group and the Gates Foundation, and the United Kingdom being the Human Rights Watch estimates that around 1,900 top three donors to the 2018 program budget. Even civilians have been massacred in North and South Kivu though this should not influence the WHO’s goverin past 3 years, while 3,300 have been abducted. While nance—its main decision-making body is the World this violence in general has posed a serious obstacle to Health Assembly with delegates from each of its 194 curbing the epidemic—it is far easier to treat disease Member States—the majority of funding is earmarked in safe, stable environments—militia groups have also by donors, or designated for a specific program. This targeted health workers and treatment centers specif- means that as long as the Global North donates the ically, with a marked impact on disease containment. most money, to a significant extent it dictates the priorAttacks on health care infrastructure and workers ities of the global health agenda. increased around the 2018 DRC presidential elecThis distinction might suggest the reasons behind tion after sitting President Joseph Kabila delayed certain policies by the WHO such as why, for example, voting for 1.2 million people in certain Ebola-affected it often places outsized emphasis on containing infecregions known to be oppositional strongholds. The tious diseases, since those pose the risk of traveling to disease itself has thus become implicated in mistrust the Global North and infecting people there. In 2018, of the government, and treatment efforts have become the organization alloted almost triple the funding to collateral damage. Just when the DRC Ministry of the prevention of communicable diseases in Africa Health had Ebola transmission “largely under control” that it did to that of noncommunicable diseases in in February 2019, a series of lethal attacks against the continent (291 million vs. 105 million, 2018-19). treatment centers caused a marked uptick in transmis- This funding disparity stands in stark contrast to the sion. And, as is evident in the CDC’s early withdrawal, fact that 71 percent of deaths worldwide result from violence impedes disease containment in a third way: noncommunicable diseases. by deterring the global health response.

In a similar vein, Western donors prefer to fund The degree to which the outbreak has been success- emergency response measures, like constructing fully contained is somewhat remarkable given the outbreak-specific facilities and offering poor counvolume of refugees that have fled the DRC since its tries ‘pandemic bonds’ to help them finance future onset. According to United Nations Refugee Agency responses, than to invest in a country’s overall healthspokesman Andrej Mahecic, Congolese refugees were care infrastructure. Besides the fixation on commufleeing to Uganda at a rate of 100-200 per day during nicable diseases, such long-term investments on the first months of the outbreak, yet it took nearly a healthcare are less economically attractive. In July, year for a case to be reported outside of the DRC. In the Director-General of the WHO Tedros Adhanom June 2019, Uganda confirmed the first incidence of Ghebreyesus tried to pitch them as economically savvy Ebola. The World Health Organization declared a to a group of African entrepreneurs in Abuja, Nigeria: Public Health Emergency of International Concern “Health creates jobs. It drives productivity. It stimulates less than a week thereafter. inclusive growth. And it protects economies from the

20 SEP 2019

BY Jacob Alabab-Moser and Izzi Olive ILLUSTRATION Mariel Solomon DESIGN Kathryn Li

impacts of outbreaks and other emergencies.” These belated remarks, given after the Ebola outbreak had ballooned beyond the point of containment, demonstrate that the overall health for inhabitants of underdeveloped countries is treated as an after-thought, a remnant of colonial mentality. And when brought up at last, health has to be pitched as an investment, a stimulator of capitalist growth.

While global health and humanitarianism in general are presented as apolitical and international-minded with ‘health as a right,’ this is impossible given the imbalance of power that privileges Global North countries’ ideologies surrounding public health; that is, prioritizing their citizens’ lives over those in the Global South, as well as their political aims and budgets.

To clarify, the WHO is not in itself the implementer of the response to the Ebola outbreak but rather acts as an advisory body to the DRC’s Ministry of Health, as well as the unified voice of the response and provider of technical support and monitoring, among other functions. It works with implementing partners like international organizations like the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders in addition to DRC-based NGOs, of which medical staff are deployed to the ‘frontline’ of the response.

Why the epidemic is unsurprising The cycle of investment capital chiefly in the DRC’s lucrative mineral export industry echoes the extractive system of mercantilism from the colonial era. While many of the transnational mining companies active in the eastern DRC today hail from Europe like their nineteenth century forebears, those from Canada, Australia, and China have also joined their ranks.

This is not to mention the role of neighboring countries like Rwanda and Uganda in looting mines in the eastern DRC through threats and coercion by armed rebel groups. Although many Western observers focus their critiques against China’s more recent entrance into mining in the DRC, it remains to be seen how or whether Chinese companies have deteriorated the status quo in terms of work conditions in the mines and macroeconomic indicators.

In Northern and Southern Kivu Provinces, the regional economy’s dependence on this system of mining has resulted in widespread poverty; the majority of unskilled laborers work for as little as $100 per month, according to the Nation. In this climate of economic exploitation by foreign transnationals and violence from armed groups, amid other factors, it is easy to see why communities are reluctant to let in health workers. Moreover, increased security forces like the Congolese army—sought by partners in the response following an uptick attacks on treatment

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facilities, warranting more thought on whom the global health regime decides to protect—has only caused local communities to vilify health workers more.

International involvement: Last time and now You might be surprised to hear that a lot of progress has been made since the last Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

New tools for rapid diagnosis, the new treatment ZMapp, and, most importantly, a new experimental vaccine have been deployed. In addition, WHO has streamlined its processes to rapidly deploy resources with the creation of an emergency fund.

Doctors Without Borders International President Joanne Liu, MD described to STAT the difficulty in containing this Ebola outbreak as “ironic,” since these significant developments have been rendered useless by the challenges specific to the DRC. Getting the outbreak ‘under control’ is now about more than providing vaccinations and treatments for a viral disease. Violence, insofar as it breeds uncertainty and fear, impedes public health measures of all kinds, creating an atmosphere in which disease can flourish.

In the DRC, violence has posed a more specific threat to disease containment efforts, when treatment centers have been caught in the crosshairs or deliberately targeted, in some cases due to mistrust of the containment efforts. In these ways, the global health response now contends with the symptoms of the DRC’s deeper historical problems, many of which implicate Western imperialism.

It is worth noting that the United States, through the CDC and other health agencies, has been less involved in the response to current DRC outbreak than it was in the 2014-2016 West African one. While US officials have cited greater contributions by other governments in financing the response, other factors include concerns about the safety of personnel and the Trump administration's reduced foreign assistance in general, stemming from the president’s isolationist foreign policy. While less aid from the US translates to less dollars and technical resources for the response, it precludes the militarization of the US humanitarian response, which occurred during the West African outbreak and could have negative consequences in the DRC context.

The relatively rural character of the current outbreak zone in the DRC’s interior also accounts for why the international community is paying less attention to this outbreak. Though granted a rural, less populated area puts less people at risk of infection and death, this outbreak’s distance from international borders and major cities has limited the response: the WHO decided against declaring the outbreak as a PHEIC

three times for not posing “a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease” before it finally did this July when it spread into Rwanda and Ebola. At the time of the PHEIC declaration, there were already 2,512 cases of Ebola since the outbreak began in August 2018 when in contrast, the more international 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak had 1,711 cases when it became a PHEIC. This delay in the DRC case suggests that despite the gravity of the situation, countries in the Global North did not care since there was no immediate threat of the disease spreading outside of the region and into their borders.

Conclusions For now, the fate of the current DRC Ebola outbreak remains unclear. While the WHO has reported a gradual decrease of transmissions with the lowest weekly incidence on September 12 since March 2019, it cautions against interpreting that the virus’s transmission intensity has decreased. Even once the outbreak is under control, the communities affected will continue to face insecurity, conflict between militias, and a lack of support by the DRC government, which will only make them prone to epidemics and other ills moving forward. And as we have seen, neocolonialism looms as the cause behind much of the DRC’s strife.

The DRC Ebola outbreak is lethal and has demanded action from the international community, but there needs to be further explanation of the murky mechanics of aid allocations and the actual response on the ground for the citizens of both Western, aid-giving countries and of the DRC and other countries affected by the outbreak.

JACOB ALABAB-MOSER ‘20 and IZZI OLIVE ‘20.5 encourage you to read Rani Chumbak's 2016 Indy piece “Who Cares?: Medicine and Colonial Modernity” (https://www.theindy.org/810) for more information on the inherently colonial nature of global health.

NEWS

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BEYOND

METOO content warning: sexual violence This week, the Features editors invited Camila Pelsinger B’20, Transformative Justice Student Coordinator, to author a piece on transformative justice on college campuses. As a student and activist, Pelsinger worked to help bring the nation’s first university Transformative Justice program and Transformative Justice practitioner Dara Bayer to Brown University this year.

Two years ago, a friend asked me to confront someone in their community who had perpetrated violence and continued to display what they described as predatory behavior. Unsure of how to address the harm without prompting defensiveness or anger, they asked me to work with the individual to help them understand the impact of their actions and change their behavior.

Over the next two years, I would be approached by many others who sought similar interventions.

Some of these requests came from survivors themselves, others came from close friends of individuals who caused harm, others from people who observed harmful behavior from afar. Unequipped to undertake these tasks, I searched for a resource on my college campus that could help. There were none. +++ In my experiences in sexual violence prevention work, what has surprised me more than the sheer number of instances of sexual violence has been the silence, shame, and guilt that surrounds it. The power of the #MeToo movement was that it started to address that silence. However, the movement relied on the emotional labor of survivors to educate the world on how they had been harmed. Likewise, institutional systems for dealing with interpersonal violence rely on survivors to come forward and commit to reliving their experience in order to convince the world they should be believed.

College campuses have incredibly high rates of

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sexual assault. Between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted while in college, while the National Institute of Justice estimates around one in seven men. One in four trans and gender-non-conforming students experience sexual assault according to a 2015 study. However, research from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center suggests as few as 10% of incidents of sexual assault on college campuses are reported. It is strikingly clear that the existing avenues for accountability are neither accessible nor desirable for survivors of sexual violence. The Title IX process can re-traumatize those who have experienced violence and forces people to prove they are telling the truth, often while facing the victim-blaming embedded in our society and institutions. Moreover, the legal representatives of perpetrators of violence rely on these sexist tropes to discount survivors’ credibility and defend their clients.

One of the most common desires of those who have experienced gender-based violence is for the person who harmed them to understand the impact of their actions and never harm anyone else. But on college campuses, there are only two ways to deal with violence when it occurs: file a complaint and undergo an investigation and trial, or remain silent about the experience with no way to ensure that the individual who caused harm will not continue to violate other people. The unrivaled insularity on college campuses make the latter option a harrowing and often dangerous default that forces survivors to share classrooms, dining halls, extra-curriculars, and even social groups with the individuals who harmed them. For many survivors, this means sacrificing participation in activities that risk these stressful run-ins, forcing them out of collegiate activities, whether social, academic, or extracurricular.

For some, healing from an experience of sexual violence requires ensuring that the individual will never violate anyone else again. For others, a road to

healing involves directly confronting the person who harmed them about their experience or knowing they won’t ever have to see them at a social event. For others still, only the knowledge that the person who caused them harm will no longer remain on campus gives them a sense of safety.

The barriers preventing survivors from seeking institutional accountability veil the harm happening in all communities. With no other mechanisms for accountability, many survivors are left feeling guilty, as if choosing not to report makes them responsible for failing to stop violent behavior and leaving others vulnerable to harm. As Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley describes in her article for the Daily Californian on sexual violence on college campuses, “the fact is that most cases don’t get reported or sufficiently addressed through formal reporting structures, limiting people’s options for taking accountability or making amends.

The stress of unresolved harm and conflict that results can fracture communities, further exacerbating trauma.” The existing resources on college campuses are failing. In order to begin protecting the safety and needs of those who have experienced violence and seek true accountability and change from those who have caused harm, college campuses are in dire need of a new framework. +++ We often think of perpetrators of violence as hooded men waiting behind bushes to snatch young women, most often white, thin, and rich, from dark alleys. We have been taught that they are evil and we are good.

What happens when those who perpetrate violence live within our own circles? What happens when the list of those who have caused harm is filled with our friends, family members, teachers, mentors?

The #MeToo movement has shown that violence happens in all communities and spaces, obscured by

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Transformative Justice on College Campuses

BY Camila Pelsinger DESIGN Christie Zhong

cultural norms that have long normalized violations of consent. Dialogues about gender-based violence are difficult precisely because they force us to examine the ways that our consent has been violated in the past, or perhaps how we have violated the consent and autonomy of others.

Many sexual violence prevention programs on college campuses empower communities to dismantle the behaviors and cultural norms that normalize and allow for harm. These frameworks acknowledge that the power to prevent violence lies in communities and networks of support. We have yet to mobilize these same networks to address the harm that has already occurred within our spaces, to take the plight of #MeToo and transform listening and believing into action. +++ Brown University recently became the first and only college campus to pilot a Transformative Justice program after hiring Dara Bayer B’08 to serve as the Transformative Justice Program Coordinator.

Transformative Justice (TJ) is a penal abolitionist political framework and set of practices for responding to interpersonal and structural violence that relies on community relationships to protect the safety and needs of survivors, while building systems of support and accountability for those who have caused and enabled harm. This framework links individual justice and collective liberation as mutually supportive and fundamentally intertwined, creating structures for communities to address harm in innovative and generative ways that prevent future violence, rather than inflicting it.

TJ has emerged from political movements and marginalized communities, including indigenous, Black, queer and trans, low-income, undocumented, disabled, and sex worker communities, that have built networks of mutual support as a way to survive and transform state and interpersonal violence. In the US, Black women in particular have been at the forefront of developing Transformative Justice and community accountability frameworks for ending genderbased violence outside of a penal system that has long exacted violence on Black and brown communities.

Describing a situation in which this model could be used to address an instance of gender-based violence on a college campus, Dara Bayer told the Independent, “In response to a situation where someone was

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assaulted or harmed, a Transformative Justice process would invite the survivor and their network of friends and community members to come together and, depending on how much the survivor wants to be involved in the process, invite them to design a plan to address the harm. One component of TJ involves developing a plan of safety for someone who has experienced harm, while the second involves mapping the relationships of the person who has caused harm and working with them to stop ongoing violence, recognize the impact of their actions, and hopefully repair the harm in whatever way would be appropriate." However, as Bayer also notes, “that [process] could take months; that could take years. There is no clear one-size-fits-all way to do that work, but it is rooted in coming together in community with shared values and developing action plans that ensure safety.”

To make these TJ processes a reality, Bayer has begun developing an apprenticeship program to equip students embedded in different communities across campus with the skill sets and relational resources to run TJ processes. “These processes must be grounded in the communities where the harm has happened, which means that this work cannot be held by one person. By its very nature, TJ is a decentralized non-coercive framework that cannot be scaled up or enforced in a top-down manner,” Bayer said.

In 2000, the Color of Violence Conference brought together 1,200 people, most of whom were women of color, to discuss the role of sexual violence in longstanding institutions of US state violence, “demanding a more nuanced and expanded understanding of the category of ‘violence against women’ that integrated the violence of medical and reproductive control, criminality, poverty, colonization, imperialism, and war,” as Alisa Bierria, Mimi Kim, and Clasissa Rojas later described in their journal on community accountability. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the network of collectives that emerged from the conference, “opened a portal for critique, analysis, and new visions for change, while contributing energy and resources to building on-the-ground alternative responses to violence.” Many community-based organizations have emerged from these networks that use Transformative Justice and community accountability frameworks to address both interpersonal and structural violence, including Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Sista II Sisita, Creative Interventions, and others.

The Transformative Justice model presents us with an opportunity to heal the trauma of past violence, prevent violence from occurring in the future, and transform the toxic conditions that beget harm.

+++ Transformative Justice processes are uniquely equipped to address harm in a way that prioritizes the needs of survivors and transfers the labor of holding perpetrators accountable for changing their behavior onto the community. Both the high incidence rate and communal nature of college campuses make them ideal spaces for Transformative Justice to shape culture and ensure accountability.

As institutions rooted in slavery and colonial violence, universities must begin to grapple with the ways that their spaces are sites of both interpersonal and institutional violence, structured around the very hierarchies that breed harm. As a community-based framework that operates outside of institutions, Transformative Justice on an elite college campus is both a paradox and an opportunity for community-based radical change. As Robin D. G. Kelley, a Professor of History at UCLA, writes in the Boston Review, “Universities will never be engines of social transformation. Such a task is the work of political education and activism.” Redistributing university resources to the work of Transformative Justice presents the opportunity to build community capacity for greater self-determination that will inevitably ripple far beyond the confines of college campuses.

The persistence of gender-based violence in the wake of the expansion of penal and carceral responses to harm suggest that existing responses to violence are failing. It has become apparent that isolating people from their communities does little to repair or prevent harm. The overwhelming prevalence of sexual violence on college campuses and the underused nature of Title IX processes make clear that existing punitive systems are insufficient. Both addressing the violence that has occurred within our communities and preventing future violence requires changing the culture of silence that has allowed for harm to persist without interruption. Colleges are insulated communities of shared space and overlapping social circles that make cultural change not only possible, but necessary. Dismantling a culture of violence that has persisted for so long requires an approach grounded in the notion that humans are constantly changing and evolving, replicating the systems and structures that are projected onto them. Transformative Justice revolutionizes the very ways in which we build community with each other in a manner that honors our humanity and keeps us accountable.

CAMILA PELSINGER B’20 encourages anyone interested in joining the Transformative Justice Practitioner Program to email camila_pelsinger@ brown.edu.

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THE FOURTH OF JULY GIRL She emerges from the port-a-potty dripping wet. The blue plastic door swings a full one hundred and eighty degrees, shuddering the entire structure. The hinges shake; she takes off running at a furious clip, bare feet on the earth, applying pressure at the ball of the foot and springing—sudden and small—forward. The grass bends back and forth at her beckoning. The porta-potty sits, still quivering slightly on its designated plot. She rushes through the field and droplets of water from her drenched bathing suit fly like marbles from her torso. Streaming, she is jeweled, imprecise, and watering the diamond of green.

He had been asked to identify his grandfather at the morgue a few weeks ago. His grandfather had had a heart attack and died at the supermarket in the toilet paper aisle. The man was 91 years old. His grandmother had died some time earlier, and his parents, both botanists, were conducting field research in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala and couldn’t be reached. After a painstakingly awkward and slow elevator ride into the basement of the hospital, he was shown into a room. As he entered, his senses were overstimulated by fluorescence and immaculateness, the sterilizing agents in the air, but at the same time, underwhelmed: despite being saturated with death, the room was disappointingly bland. It had office ceiling tiles and a cup with pencils in the corner.

He felt heavy and human, as if, by breathing, he was adding too much carbon dioxide to the air. There, on the table, lay his grandfather, wearing blue boxer shorts and a yellowing white undershirt, with his eyes shut and his tufted white hair less clean than usual. In life, he’d been a regular kook of the mannerly, affable sort, with hyper-expressive blue eyes, wildly unkempt white eyebrows, and a distinctive cackle that carried down city blocks. He nodded. Could he leave now? He turned to go and, faced with his grandfather’s wilting

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feet, saw that his toenails extended at least three quarters of an inch past each toe. They were sallow and had visible craquelure spidering outward, clumping in odd places like old grits, and as he made for the door, the nurse grabbed his sleeve, “It happens when you die!

Your toes, they shri— ” but before the nurse had the opportunity to finish, he’d turned through the door and made it halfway down the hall. “Sir, you have to sign—!” the nurse called after him.

Now, the Fourth of July girl moves swiftly through pathways made by hanging skewers and tableclothed folding tables, short-haired waggers and chopsticked paper flags. They are creating a roaring and fuchsia buzz, and the kelly green grass, wet with dew and ocean humidity, is sodden and mud-stained in places.

She crawls through darkening and moist palaces, red and white-checked picnic blanket palaces where she can pretend she lives.

Two centenarian magnolia trees frame the going-in. A trickle of cars beep softly toward the water, corralled by the human edges of things. He anticipates wellmeaning but inquisitive talk of his grandfather from his parents’ friends and decides he’ll tell the anecdote of the last time he saw Grizzly. He had gone over to his house to make spaghetti, but Grizzly, self-proclaimed pro-chopper, had cried so much over the onions—his Achilles’ heel, he said—that his vision became blurry.

He sliced his finger, now just a chopper, releasing scarlet blood over the cutting board. And, without even batting an eye, he taped a bit of paper towel around the wound, announced that they were going out for pizza.

The onions, now pink, sat on the counter.

She crawls between legs and, because she is plastic-beaded, collects dirt in rings around her neck.

She imagines the people as a ceremony of aliens,

BY Catherine Habgood ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Christie Zhong

faceless from her angle, knees and denimmed legs busy keeping each other busy. The game is to slide a hotdog from the top of the table without being noticed underfoot and undertable. She pulls a string of beads over her head, swinging it upward, cascading a platter of hotdogs to the grass.

The woman in bright, wallpaper-printed kaftan is bragging about “the cousins,” as she calls them, and his listening is interrupted by explosions in the sky.

She seems not to notice, talking and pausing with regular rhythm. She leans toward him as if about to spill juicy gossip from her bosom. “The youngest one was working on his college apps when he was at our house, so you know, he let me read one of his responses, and, oh, it was divine!” He’s stopped listening, really, watching the lightning bugs flash over her shoulder and wondering how long they live for and whether they die with their lights on.

She notices that he keeps his toenails cut quite short, as short as she’s ever seen them, and they make his toes look disproportional and off, sort of stubby and weird.

It looks like it might even hurt, having nails that short.

Blades of grass stick up between his toes like hairs or carpet until the feet start walking and move away. She is doggedly following heels. Someone says, “Whose is this?”

A shirtless boy is saying to a girl with overenthusiastic gesturing, “Yeah, I want to be an activist to stand up—” and the sky erupts. The colors rain. She asks, “Do you know how I get home from here?”

The reply: “Why? Are you scared?”

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Cathy I hate missing sock mistake I hate rat raisin fluorescent forget and death and a plastic clothing hanger wet paper crowded flip flops with heels carbohydrated turquoise trip I hate Jimmy Fallon and jeggings and sporks messy messy hurt humid handshake hurt I hate dumb and sticky smell arts crafts promised plaster in wifi I hate sand in food the number three Cathy I hate you knot never loathing loading liquorice I hate math moth meth broken zipper wait and laminate a lie I hate lost

kumquat I love button billow baby banana bad water luck in lavender and kumquat in footsteps pretty like corduroy cuffed calling out I love half I love celadon spoonful of sigh only in the winter click clack sail stomp leather luck lust — I love wait I love throb I love nail beds I love nails and beds wrinkles in beds books butters ballets in beds and almost in half and half dim light dim I love whatever comes to mind the fucking smell of ugly ugly things cannot I love I love and

TWO POEMS

BY Alana Baer ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Christie Zhong

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

08

BY Victoria Caruso ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-

Stoll DESIGN Christie Zhong

FROM DECRIM TO RECRIM Ten years of recriminalized indoor sex work in Rhode Island

Every Wednesday night, Bella Robinson parks her tangerine Nissan Rogue inside the faded lines of the lot by the McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts on Broad Street, a spot she says the “working girls” often visit between shifts. It was 18 degrees the night the College Hill Independent spoke to Robinson, and her SUV was one of the few stragglers in the glazed parking lot. It could have snowed at any minute, but still, she decided to stand next to the trunk of her car. With her glasses pushed back in her auburn-dyed hair and a scarlet pea coat to match, she shivered in the cold, waiting for her guests to arrive. “Hey honey, what do you need?” she said to a heavy-set man approaching her.

“Anything you can spare,” he replied.

Trunk opened wide, she reached inside and pulled out four floral-patterned bins filled with the essentials for her outreach work: water, hygiene supplies, naloxone kits, condoms, gloves, hats, and Ritz-crackers.

As the executive director of COYOTE RI (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island), a sex workers’ rights organization, Robinson offers supplies to sex workers and anyone else who is in need, no questions asked. Outside of outreach, Robinson volunteers her time educating high school students, university students, and local organizations about sex work and is a leading advocate for the decriminalization of sex work in Rhode Island.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the criminalization of indoor sex work in Rhode Island. ‘Indoor’ sex work refers to offering of sexual services through websites, escort agencies, and massage parlors. From 1980 to 2009, the practice had been legal due to a legislative loophole that strengthened laws against outdoor, street-based sex work and accidentally legalized indoor sex work in the process. The mistake went unnoticed until 2003, when eight women could not be convicted after police arrested them in a sting operation on massage parlors. Sex workers from all over the country started flocking to the new safe haven state when they discovered the loophole. +++

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Robinson herself is no stranger to sex work; it’s been her livelihood on and off for thirty-five years. Now fifty-four years old, she says it's how she can afford her home, purchase a brand-new truck, and support her cat, Bobby Two. Her path to sex work started at 18, after she left the 41-year-old man she had married only a year before.

After the marriage ended, she decided to live out of her car, eventually making friends that would become her survival guides and teach her how to work the streets.

“I learned that if I turned two tricks, it paid for my hotel, cigarettes, food, and I would never have to kiss a man’s ass again. I was the master of my own castle,” Robinson told the Independent.

In 2009, Robinson was working in New Jersey using online sites like Backpage.com when one of her clients told her that sex work was decriminalized in Rhode Island. She initially dismissed the comment, assuming the man was trying to impress her, but a quick Google search verified her hopes. It was all she needed to pack up her home and move to Rhode Island.

“Oh my god, girl, it was like freedom for the first time,” Robinson said.

For the first time in her life, she could call the cops on customers who threatened her, work from home without the fear of being evicted, and raise her child without any fear of losing her.

But her freedom was an accident, a mere legislative error. In 2009, there was an eruption of opinions that criticized the legality of indoor sex work. Donnie Anderson, executive minister of Rhode Island State Council of Churches, wrote in a statewide email saying, “There can be no doubt [sex work] is twenty-first century slavery and we have placed ourselves in the eye of the storm.”

Donna Hughes, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island who spoke against decriminalization in 2009, feared the loophole would enable sex trafficking.

“I felt it was very important to stop the movement to decriminalize prostitution in the United States,” she stated in a podcast created by WHYY, a public FM radio station that serves Philadelphia. “The ones who get freedom are the pimps, the sex buyers, the businessmen who then can rent properties to the massage

parlors and to the sex buyers. There’s very little freedom for the women.”

There had not been a federally prosecuted human trafficking case reported in Rhode Island for nearly a decade, but the critics of decriminalization won. On November 3, 2009, Governor Donald Carcieri signed a bill into law, just six months after Robinson set foot in Rhode Island, that closed the loophole and took her taste of freedom away from her.

“When I found out, I got pissed,” says Robinson. “I didn’t know anything about being an activist. I didn’t know anything about sex workers’ rights.”

About a year after the loophole was closed, Robinson read about the Gilgo beach murders, a series of killings of women on Long Island—many of whom were associated with prostitution—committed by an unknown murderer.

“I started becoming an activist after that.

Something in me just broke, and I told myself, this isn’t okay,” says Robinson. +++ Criminalization puts sex workers in a vulnerable state where the fear of being arrested may prevent workers from reporting acts of violence.

The current laws render it almost impossible for sex workers to do their work safely and to seek help from other sex workers. For instance, according to Robinson, if sex workers work together, they risk being charged with a felony for promoting. This happened to Robinson, who, at 44, was working with another woman off Craigslist when a SWAT team kicked down her door and arrested them.

Under this system, many sex workers also refuse to share information about clients with each other for fear of getting charged with a felony.

“If sex work is decriminalized, I can say, ‘Yeah, I know Tom, he's a nice guy’,” says Robinson. “Or I can say, ‘Uh, no, he’s on a blacklist for choking some girl out...’ and I'm supposed to go to jail for promoting prostitution because I want to help keep others safe?”

The inability to organize under criminalization also creates a lack of solidarity. According to Robinson,

20 SEP 2019

if sex workers try to unionize, they may be charged work, stating, “I oppose decriminalization because with criminal enterprise.

I don’t believe it does anything to promote family As a sex worker who has lived through both values.” decriminalization and criminalization, Robinson is Robinson argues that human-trafficking has little determined to demonstrate the positive impacts of to do with the majority of sex work. “Immediately legalized sex work. Part of this effort is lobbying for when legislators come hear about the resolution, the H5354, a resolution introduced by Representative response comes from anti-trafficking people and Anastasia Williams this past February, which would people who've never worked in the sex industry,” she create a commission to formally study the health and says. safety effects of decriminalization in Rhode Island. It In a 2017 study performed by COYOTE RI, 1,494 would also guarantee COYOTE RI a seat at the table, sex workers were interviewed, and of this population, which would give the organization, and Robinson, a only four percent considered themselves victims of voice at the state level. trafficking. 51 percent of the sex workers, on the other On April 4, 2019, after a hearing in the House, it hand, reported being victims of a crime while working, was decided that the resolution would be held for and almost seventy percent of them said they would further study. Robinson plans on “going for it again” not report it to the police. next year, but the real win, she says, was that COYOTE Robinson argues that a majority of the news about was able to testify and spread its message. sex trafficking has been inflated by anti-sex work “Our testimony was well-planned, where people groups in order to get funding from sponsors. She talked on different points to call out the narrative and claims the “rescue lobby,” as she calls them, tries to tell some stories, and now it’s on public record,” says make victims out of sex workers who are caught, promRobinson. ising them benefits in return. “The police will threaten The ACLU, RI NOW, and The Womxn Project HQ you,” she says. “They'll say, ‘We're going to put your are some of the supporters of the resolution. name in the paper and everyone is going to know that In an interview with the Independent, Steven you're a whore, but if you say that you were forced, you Brown, Executive Director of the ACLU, said that can become a victim. ’ Then they'll parade you around H5354 is a “good and timely bill that will revisit the a fundraiser so you can tell your struggles on the state's prostitution laws.” microphone...”

“The ACLU long supports decriminalization. We A better solution to combating sex trafficking, think it's a victimless crime and think the state has Robinson argues, would be to have “knock and talks,” nothing to do with it,” Brown told the Independent. where, rather than arresting sex workers, undercover “We recognize the disproportionate discrimination on police would book an appointment with sex workers to women that this law creates, as [women] are the ones check in on them to make sure they're safe. to most likely be charged with the crime.”

Robinson made a point to mention that supporting Still, there are others similar to Hughes, who are sex work doesn't neccesarily mean you approve of more skeptical of the resolution and the decriminal- it, it just means you understand that criminalization ization of sex work. Some opponents shared Hughes' contributes to the abuse of this population. sex-trafficking concerns, like Rhode Island House In the end, Robinson thinks she is working Representative Sherry Roberts. The representative torwards a larger, more complicated goal than the refused to comment on the resolution itself, but wrote decriminalization of sex work. in an email to the Independent, “I believe it could “Yes, we want decriminalization,” she explains, potentially become an enticement for increased crim- “but if we win it tomorrow, they’re only going to try and inal activity into the state, like human-trafficking, for take it away, like abortion. I feel like my job has to be example.” Roberts also had other concerns about sex about shifting social perception. Because when the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

majority of society starts to stand up for sex workers, they’re not going to be able to take our rights away from us.”

VICTORIA CARUSO B‘21 thinks everyone who is able to should support COYOTE RI at https://www. gofundme.com/f/soliciting-for-change.

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EPHEMERA

20 SEP 2019

BY Ella Rosenblatt ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN

COLLECTING SEDIMENTS Cappadocia and carving out homes My mom’s name is Petra. Short for Petronella, it shares the Greek root “petros” with petrified, Peter, and petrol. Petros means “stone,” and my mom likes to say, as clichéd and cheesy as it is, that she is “my rock.”

The name does feel unusually appropriate for her in my eyes. She has collected striped rocks for as long as I can remember. Her favorites are usually smooth and grey and small enough to fit in an enclosed fist, with a distinct white streak. When I was little, I would scour the Dutch beaches where she grew up looking for stones to add to her collection. She amassed so many of them that they fill glass jars in her bathroom today.

(I think she had to start secretly discarding rocks that I retrieved because there simply got to be too many.)

When I turned twenty, she gifted me a striped rock necklaceof which she has a matching pair. These stones and stripes link us to each other and her to her home. +++ When I was in elementary school, we made cave diagrams with Bugles. I glued them in rows like a shark’s teeth to the mouth of my paper cave. We spent more time capping our fingers with the salty snacks and popping them in our mouths than we did talking about geological formations, but I’ll also never forget what stalactites and stalagmites are.

In Cappadocia, people used to live in giant stalagmites. It’s now a landscape of impossibly skinny mountains or impossibly tall buttes. A thousand years ago, humans slashed into the rocks to carve out their homes, and many of the dwellings remain. There are tunnels and engineered, arched rooms. Full underground city complexes hide beneath the rock. The tunnels, which I've only seen in photos, alternately look like inflated insect hives and castle bedrooms. It’s a world of wobbly structures and shapes nestled in modern-day Turkey.

The people who originally burrowed into those giant stalactites eventually ended up moving past the region, leaving it open to others settling in or passing through. Its first occupants to leave written historical documents were the Hittite, when Cappadocia was a location along the Silk Road. Then the Persian empire invaded in the sixth century, to be overthrown by the Roman empire around 200 years later. Each saw new tenants settling into the burrows. Even more conquests followed: a Christian influx, the Seljuk Turks, and the Ottomans. All the while, the peaks of rock remained surrounding and sheltering people.

Later, in 1923, the Greek and Turkish governments imposed an official population exchange that displaced many Cappadocians to Greece and produced a remote new language: Cappadocian Greek. Situated in a region dominated by Turkish, the language took on Turkish characteristics, but originally was related to Ancient Greek. It was thought to have died as people in the region adopted Turkish instead, but recently some who still speak Cappadocian Greek today were discovered.

The language descends from both Western European languages and ones spoken farther toward East Asia, a linguistic midpoint in a region that has hosted many groups over time, accumulating influences.

The rocks that these groups inhabited are layered, Kızılkaya ignimbrite above Cemilköy ignimbrite. The first is reddish and harder to wear down, while the latter is gray and more easily weathered; this combination creates the Cappadocian cones. There are “fairy chimneys” or “hoodoos”—naturally-occurring obelisks with almost spherical pinpoints at their tops. Less precarious peaks are smooth like enormous river rocks, a pure whitish-gray. Many are dotted with windows from the burrows within.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Ella Rosenblatt

appear surprisingly stable despite their thin trunks.

Tourists flock to the valley to see this sculpted world and its strangely intentional rocks. Advertisements online show skies full of hot-air balloons. They float above the peaks, cheekily hinting that they might touch down to lightly tap each apex. A guide website called “Captivating Cappadocia lists a categorization of fairy chimneys: “The Traditional Phallic,” “Elf Houses,” “Pyramid-ish,” “Dunce Caps.” I’m impressed with the imagination people bring to simple peaks, what people +++ can see.

I wonder if it is possible to get over the places I first heard about Cappadocia from a podcast interview with one of my favorite writers, Elif Batuman, a we aspire to visit. I don’t know when the image of year after I received the stone necklace from my mom. Cappadocia’s peaks will leave my mind, if ever, and I Batuman mentioned the place in passing, and I could don’t know if my mom will ever say that she’s happy have easily let the detail go unexplored. But I had been exactly where she is. She never expected to stay in the thinking around that time about how often I let people U.S. She dreamed of visiting, and when she finally did, mention unfamiliar details and avoid interrupting the she happened to meet a friendly young architect on the conversation to fill myself in. It occurred to me that plane (my dad). There is a difference between wanting this could cause me to miss out on a richness in these to visit a place and wanting to live there permanently, exchanges. I decided to Google this unfamiliar place and there is a difference between hoping to visit a place she mentioned, and the images of natural rock spires and having the privilege to actually access it. I asked stuck in my head long after I closed the tab. I kept my mom about this recently and she said, “When I mentally returning to this magical place, and it made studied film I wanted to go to America ’cause it is the me think of the thousands of other places like it that land of movies—wanted to make a road trip. Even at 25 when I went to the States I never expected to live here.” might exist.

My mom is an immigrant from the Netherlands, She was lucky to have the choice to stay, unlike many and our conversations have always been punctuated by other immigrants, but it wasn’t necessarily a conscious idealistic statements about elsewheres. She often says, decision, and it wasn’t based on how she had romanassertively, “someday I will live in a house by the sea.” ticized the United States before. She never actually She makes textile art about the tulip fields and horizon experienced a moment of transition from desiring to lines where she grew up: geometric expanses of hand- be in America to desiring to stay; rather, it was somedyed fabric broken by vibrant stripes and calligraphy. thing that happened to her in a series of events. Like the She collects postcards depicting the flat Dutch land- layers of Kızılkaya ignimbrite and Cemilköy ignimbrite, scape situated precariously below sea level and tacks choices and moments had piled up—moving to them up for inspiration. “We are moving. We’re going Pittsburgh when my dad got a job there, deciding to go to live here,” she would say about every place we visited to grad school at Carnegie Mellon University, getting a on family trips, always with the same striking convic- job in a gallery there, eventually having kids, a dog, a house. tion. She is serially in love at first sight.

My mom was born on certain rocks and then When my mom immigrated to the United States, I imagine she might have seen movement as a solu- moved to stand on others. I visited her Dutch stones, tion. There must have been something missing in her picked them up, and she and I carried them away, as life in Holland, or at least something she sought. I water and wind and gravity did the same. Rocks can always thought she would not have made a change be solid enough to be mountains and Cappadocian as drastic as moving across the ocean without some homes. But they, like people, are also piecemeal and dissatisfaction with her previous home. I wonder now scattered. Sometimes we hold rocks so close that they if the United States struck her as more of a home than rest above our hearts on lengths of string, and someAmsterdam or Leiden or the rocky North Sea beaches. times we leave the largest ones behind.

At the time, I doubt she thought about how her home +++ might become fractured or multiplied. Now her collection of rocks includes Appalachian pebbles and rubble from the Maine beaches where my dad spent his child- When I was little, I believed in God. I imagined a huge hood summers. She has accumulated a conglomerate figure who cast the world in shadow, and his tears were of places she’s visited or lived in, and, at the same rain. Now, when I look at Cappadocia, I can’t help but time, these new places have created fault lines in her see an image of a god-artist shaping the world. I love to imagine this sculptor, molding the hills. The landformerly singular home. scape seems so intentional, so constructed by a mind, that this creation story is the most plausible to me. I +++ see enormous hands squeezing the volcanic rock as if In a geology course, I learned that all striped rocks it were clay and forming lumpy, oversized stalagmites were at one point horizontal to the earth’s crust. I like drippy candlesticks. Thumbs smooth over the rock immediately thought of my mom’s collection, of lining and pull it into tall peaks as the earth spins like an enorup all the slender white stripes. Of course, it’s unlikely mous ceramics wheel. When it’s done, the figure whisthey all came from the same place, but I was interested pers to the the little humans, Go ahead, carve out your in the idea that they had some origin aligned with world.

I imagine the same enormous fingers painting the earth. There they could have been, horizontally stacked and attached, and then, ever so gradually, they vibrant-hued tulip fields. They dip in wells of color and pull out globs of pasty paint. Fingers smear, making broke off and apart, drifting and scattering.

There is a valley in Cappadocia comically called the patterns, making geometry. It all blurs into the “Love Valley” where the fairy chimneys are distinctly abstract: hands, cones, rectangles, red rock, gray rock, phallic. The stronger red rock has worn less than calluses, old hands, pink tulips, blue sky. the grey to form towers that fill a grassy landscape.

Asparagus-like columns shoot up from the ground and ELLA ROSENBLATT B’21 just got a pet rock.

The houses do not default to box shapes. I can imagine that the people who lived there through the centuries took for granted these geological formations around them, while, to me, they’re unlike any house I’ve seen. My mom took her home with her in broken-off pieces, collected sediments. For the ancient Cappadocians, rock was also home, just here and now around them.

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Whenever I have a problem, my parents believe vitamins are the solution: “Feeling tired from classwork?

“There must be an iron deficiency acting there, plus you haven’t been consistent with B12 since you’ve quit eating meat.

“A sniffle when the weather starts to cool down?

“You better double up on vitamin C lozenges, start your day with echinacea, and add in a vitamin D pill.

“Strep throat, sinus infections, headache, or the flu?

“You must have not been taking your vitamins.”

I spent most of my life rolling my eyes at their nagging, feeling apathetic to their habitual plastic measuring cup full of colorful pills of different sizes and shapes. Only after a considerable amount of pressure did I hesitantly negotiate with them and buy a pack of multivitamin gummies, a biotin pill, and a B-complex pill. For the most part, these bottles of vitamins have since become another forgotten relic collecting dust in my cabinet. The idea of having a daily ritual is appealing, but I’m still just working on making sure I find time to eat a meal before 3 pm. My vitamins have only been revisited on unique occasions: a momentary health craze, an anemia self-diagnosis spiral, or a laziness-hunger combination that made it hard to distinguish between the multivitamin gummies and fruit snacks.

But when I saw an ad for the vitamin company Ritual on my Instagram feed, I suddenly wanted my own daily supplement regimen. Without a doubt, Ritual does stand out with their visually compelling design—clear capsules filled with tiny white beads is more definitive of being on top of your life than suspended in a yellow oil. Moreover, they’ve built a having the time and self-discipline to stick to a vitamin powerful brand identity with their site’s yellow and routine? Along the same lines, their feed endorses white colors, the repetition of the words clear, clean, and applauds extreme self-care as the formulaic sum simple, and their women-run revolution messaging: of drinking enough water, sleeping eight hours, inbox “Created for and by women who wouldn’t settle for zero-ing, applying a facemask, wearing sunscreen, and less than the truth.” With such compelling marketing, putting your phone on airplane mode. Full of women within minutes of perusing their page I was debating glowing with all-natural beauty, sipping matcha from not only purchasing their $30 monthly vitamin metal straws and making their 7 AM yoga class, their subscription, but also potentially buying a honey- brand radiates wellness without much focus on their yellow sweatshirt with “RITUAL” plastered across the actual product. front.

Aside from Instagram ads, Ritual also sponsors A 2013 Gallup poll showed that there is a significant YouTube influencers to endorse them. One such video generation gap between those who take vitamins and by the plant-based, sustainable fashion and lifestyle those who don’t. Only about one third of Americans influencer WearIlive is entitled “Wellness plans between the ages of 18 to 29 years old said that they and getting my life together.” In it, a recent Fashion regularly take vitamins or mineral supplements, Institute of Technology graduate, Jenny Welbourn, compared to more than half of individuals in the 50-64 shares her goals for taking care of herself, including age range and 68% of those who are over 65 years old. her “honest” feedback on Ritual’s multivitamin, Despite a lack of evidence to show that vitamins are which she noted was sponsoring her video. Welbourn beneficial, the concept of having a daily regimen that says, “Especially when I was in school and really busy I gives the sense of longevity, well-being, and overall would not plan my days around food. I think it’s really control over your health has promoted vitamins' popu- important to fill those gaps with a vitamin.” As to why larity for people of older generations, like my parents. she chooses Ritual over other vitamins, she points out In recent years, however, the multivitamin industry that it’s a women-owned and run company, veganhas begun targeting a new demographic—primarily friendly, and you can tell where everything is coming middle-class and affluent women. Business Insider from. cites these trends, stating, “These formulas ooze with Transparency, down to the see-through design of the lifestyle trends of 2017: minimalism (‘Everything the capsules, is what drove Ritual’s founder and CEO, you need and nothing you don't!’), bright colors, ‘clean Katerina Schneider, to build her own multivitamin eating,’ and personalization.” That’s where brands like brand. In their promotional video “Why we reinRitual have found their niche in the online market- vented the vitamin?” Schneider shares what inspired place, turning a product that was once a stale necessity her to launch the company. She was pregnant, purging into a fashionable commodity. her house of all the products with ingredients that Brit & Co, a lifestyle blog for women asks “Are she distrusted, from polyethylene glycol to titanium cool girl vitamins really a thing?” and affirmatively dioxide. But her attempts to swap out her prenatal answers that yes, yes they are. The article states,“With vitamin for one without any of the same questionable typography and graphics cute enough to copy onto ingredients she was noticing in the products around a tote bag, it’s immediately clear who Ritual wants her house left her at a dead-end. Four months into her to reach: millennial women. If you still find your- pregnancy, obsessed with her search for the perfect self looking for an added wellness boost even after prenatal vitamin, she quit her job and decided to create bathing in Glossier’s brand new serums, this is for you.” her own brand. She says in an interview with Forbes, Ritual, and several other similar brands like Care/of “We became so obsessed about our ingredients that or Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” use Instagram ads and we decided to share every scientist and source on our carefully curated marketing designs to compel this site. That is how the idea of ‘traceability’ was born.” demographic of women to buy their product. In the Schneider partnered with biomedical scientist Dr. same way that the concept of conquering a healthy Luke Bocci to put together a website that makes their lifestyle through a daily vitamin regimen is attrac- ingredient selection and sourcing comprehensive and tive to older people, brands like Ritual introduce their trackable. product, and the idea of a self-care routine, as an essenSchneider told Forbes that she invested their seed tial element to reaching stable adulthood. money heavily into two areas: R&D and evidently, They motivate working women to conquer their brand identity. One of their brand strategy directors, busy schedule and realize the ultimate badge of Jessica Yan, describes her takeaway from working with success and stability—room for “me time.” What Ritual on her website. “Ritual's science-led approach

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SCIENCE + TECH

was crucial to the brand. But as their name suggests, the end goal was not a lab coat product but one that enriches a daily ritual of wellness. It was crucial for us to embody the feeling of taking ownership over one's health without skimping on hard science and education.”

But a closer look at Ritual’s marketing tells a different story. While they preach openness as a quality of their brand, their advertisements falsely use positive quotes from paid advertisements for articles on websites such as Well & Good and PureWow. In the New York Times article, "Tricky Ads from a Vitamin Company that Talks up Openness," business reporter Sapna Maheshwari writes, “In an industry built on products that do not require reviews for safety or effectiveness from the Food and Drug Administration, companies can easily get away with making dubious claims.” With the ability to sponsor advertisements, like the one that Welbourn presented on her channel, it is difficult to determine what is true or merely an advertisement. Ritual paid these platforms to review their product, and then used quotes from their articles as evidence that their product is successful and well-liked. In response to the Times, Schneider said that she did not believe that it was misleading to use those quotations in their ads, even though they were taken from sponsored posts. She said in an email, “If it were a statement of more substance, about the product’s efficacy or something mirroring a structure-function claim, we would treat it differently.” Additionally, she claimed that the “links included in the ads that quote from the sponsored Well & Good pieces are enough to give consumers an idea of Ritual’s financial relationship with the site.” The brand is superseding the product here—like Schneider says, these ads aren’t about the substance of the product, they’re about everything that taking this multivitamin every day represents: aesthetics of control, stability, and empowerment.

Another troubling aspect of their product lies in their claim to have all-natural ingredients with traceable sources. Laid out in a schema on their website are splatters and smears of the nine essential ingredients contained in the capsule that Ritual determined to be missing from a woman’s diet; methylated folate from Italy, omega-3 from the same microalgae that NASA uses in space, and D3 from wild-harvested lichen in the United Kingdom are some of the attractive ingredients that fill their capsules. Their pictures present the idea that these all-natural, vegan ingredients are coming directly from their natural sources. Upon clicking on each ingredient an article appears discussing their provider, where it’s manufactured, why they chose it, and what it does in your body backed by scientific

20 SEP 2019

BY Jennifer Katz ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

studies. But looking further at their supplement facts, they are listed as chemically synthesized vitamins.

That means that these products—like those of many of its competitors—are manufactured synthetically with chemicals and do not come directly from their natural sources.

And further, beside each of their vitamins’ claims contains an asterisk. At the very bottom of their page, beside their privacy policy and terms of service are the small letters that say, “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

As with drugs and medications, vitamins and supplements are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But unlike drugs, they are only regulated to the point of preventing “significant harm.”

The FDA defines dietary supplements supplements as products “taken by mouth that contain a ‘dietary ingredient.’” The umbrella term of dietary supplements, encapsulates not only vitamins and mineral formulas, but also those derived from herbs, glands, botanicals, amino acids, hormonal extracts, probiotics, or enzymes packaged in varying forms of tablets, capsules, gel caps, powders, or liquids.

In 1994, Congress enacted the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). The act served to eliminate government regulation of dietary and herbal supplements industry, barring the Food and Drug Administration from blocking a supplement from reaching market. The agency could only take action if they become aware of health and safety problems with the product after the fact. Under the DSHEA, companies can make general health claims about many kinds of supplements without being checked by federal reviews of their safety and effectiveness before hitting the market. With such lax regulation, vitamin companies thrive on unrestricted branding power.

Supplement sites like Ritual are sprinkled with asterisks referring to disclaimers in small font that essentially remove the authority from many of their statements. The law states that the manufacturer is responsible for ensuring the accuracy or truthfulness of these claims—not the FDA—and it must state in a disclaimer that the FDA has not evaluated such a claim. The disclaimer must also state that the product is not intended to “diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease,” because only a drug can legally make such a claim. Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik compares this process to a twisted version of the presumption of innocence. “In other words, supplements were assumed to be innocent until proven guilty.”

The glaring issue with the presumption of

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

How the vitamin industry sells health innocence that the DSHEA has introduced is that often times the proof of guilt looks like severe side effects for users, or even more commonly, death. In 2013, for instance, Dr. Kenneth Spaeth noticed that many of his patients were reporting strange symptoms: one woman had bleeding scales on her head, another lost her position in a choir because her voice had changed, men reported the formation of male breasts, and others noted increased aggression. He discovered a common link between each of these patients—they had all been regularly taking a vitamin B-50 supplement by the brand Purity First. Candace Tripp started this vitamin company in the 1980s, making the pills by hand in her kitchen using scientific knowledge she taught herself from trips to the medical library. When the FDA was notified of users’ side effects they told Tripp she didn’t have to stop selling the product because nobody had died. They were only taken off the market after the results came back from a product that Dr. Spaeth eventually arranged. The vitamin capsules were evidently laced with two anabolic steroids.

Despite the dangers and the many consumers that have been endangered, the industry is still booming.

Back in 1994, about 600 U.S. supplement companies were producing about 4,000 products for a total revenue of about $4 billion. According to one estimate at the end of last year, the size of the global supplement industry is now roughly $128 billion, with the United States representing the largest single country/ region at 31.4 percent market share—more than $40 billion and over 90,000 products on the market. And it’s only projected to grow, a new report by Grand View Research, Inc forecasts the dietary supplements market to reach $194.63 billion by 2025.

Many view Orrin Hatch, the former senator from Utah, as the chief author of this federal law. Hatch loves the supplement industry. Early in his career, he sold vitamins and supplements, and later, as a senator,

he claimed to take them every day. The relationship between Hatch and Utah’s vitamin industry, often called the Silicon Valley of nutritional supplements, has always been symbiotic. Hatch collected an enormous amount of campaign contributions from supplement manufacturers, and then facilitated the lax regulation of their products. On top of that Hatch’s son is a longtime supplement industry lobbyist in Washington.

Though Hatch retired at the end of last year, his law lives on even when studies show that there is not clear evidence that they’re beneficial. Better regulation is the answer; the FDA must ensure that dietary supplements are safe and reliably marketed. They should be subject to the same regulations as drugs—considered unsafe until proven safe rather than safe until proven unsafe. As it is now, vitamin companies are fundamentally deceptive and free to use strategic marketing to sell their brand and the promise of a healthier lifestyle without any objective evidence that their product benefits one’s health.

Without a doubt, Ritual has made steps in the right direction by providing more accessible information about their vitamins. But their ability to use marketing to manipulate women into incorporating their product as a daily self-care ritual is symptomatic of a flawed vitamin industry. Consumers of all ages, my parents included, must proceed with caution when dealing with dietary supplements. And with this new leg of aestheticized vitamins hitting the market, or at least our social media feeds, it’s easy to be taken in by their ads. They tell us that the ritual of a vitamin regimen empowers us and gives us control over our bodies. But instead, the ads hide the complicated truth about vitamins behind a veil of clear capsules.

JENNIFER KATZ B’20 no longer wants to see Ritual ads all over her feeds.

SCIENCE + TECH

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DISNEY TO

In 2019, the Walt Disney Company became the very first studio to release five films that each grossed over one billion dollars in a single year. As a projectionist at an independent movie theater in Massachusetts, I couldn’t help but see the writing on the wall. As a one-screen theater, our cinema was consistently strong-armed by the Mouse into only playing their most recent blockbuster for up to four weeks worth of showings—an agreement that shoves out other big-name releases and potential indie underdogs.

While bad for business, the alternative is also financial suicide: choose to not screen the most recent Disney flicks and watch audiences flock to adjacent venues while revenue dips even more dramatically. Needless to say, I saw the smash hit remake of The Lion King more times than I could count over the course of the summer. Though I came to appreciate the film’s visual excellence, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that there was something lacking in its attempt at engaging a more mature demographic. Disney remakes tend to improve positively upon problematic legacies left by their originals, but leave out the silliness and fantastical elements for which many audiences are nostalgic.

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DUST So how does the recent string of Disney remakes—a list that comprises hits like The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland, Christopher Robin, and Jungle Book, among others—go about adapting animated films to the live-action format? And how does this change of medium affect the logic guiding these films, as well as their thematic coherence? Such an investigation must start with the progenitor of this fairly recent genre of blockbuster, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, directed by Burbank’s most commercially successful misfit, Tim Burton. Deliberately or not, the master of mall-goth perfected a technique of revising children’s animated classics to fit a more ‘mature’ aesthetic palate, thereby appealing to an adult audience on top of the franchise’s core tween viewership. Alice highlights two essential ways in which subsequent Disney remakes would diverge from and ultimately contrast with their traditionally-animated originals: first, using live-action and

BY Tristan St. Germain ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Kathryn Li

CGI to produce a sense of realism that their animated counterparts did not try to accomplish, and second, crafting complicated plots and grimmer characters to ostensibly elevate classic titles beyond their status as children’s cartoons.

Compared to the wonky, proto-psychedelic atmosphere of the 1951 original, Burton’s Alice eschews lighthearted caricatures in favor of CGI creatures whose hyperrealistic designs border the uncanny valley. In the version that Walt himself produced, the Mad Hatter and March Hare, among other residents of Wonderland, are drawn with wacky proportions that children can comprehend and relate to quite easily; take the famous tea party sequence, where Hatter and Hare celebrate their “un-Birthday” by performing bizarre feats of dubious logic, such as causing a chorus of pots to sing in harmony, or filling cups that have been sawed in half with tea. Despite the scene’s ridiculous presentation, every action works within the bizarre logic and impossible physics familiar to animation. The magical elements present mainly express the emotional contours of Alice’s reality. Not much of the same can be said for Burton’s version, which retains the original’s quirks and exaggerations, but varnishes

20 SEP 2019

Cultural nostalgia and cynicism in live action remakes

them in a dourness that tries to convince the viewer of the film’s dramatic integrity. Though Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter still speaks with a lisp and lobs tea in stacked cups, his gaunt and ghostly features diminish the character’s playful nature. Similarly, March Hare’s frantic twitching, now rendered with convincing detail, reminds one of a diseased animal. The remake constantly declares its resistance to the whimsical reality of the source material, and only occupies its framework in a detached and vacant manner. As a result, all of Wonderland’s emotional connectivity is short-circuited: One sees the characters as ironic parodies of naively illustrated Disney creations.

Facing similar complications is 2018’s Christopher Robin, in which the Walt Disney Company resurrects Winnie the Pooh and his woodland friends as CGI dolls.

This goes against the way in which Winnie has always been presented: an anthropomorphic bear whose plush animal status is never placed under scrutiny.

Partly as a result of this unbroken principle, generations of children have invested the character with trust and admiration. Yet the 2018 version goes out of its way to emphasize Pooh’s inanimate existence by highlighting every thread, stitch, and matting of fur; even his beady eyes are more akin to buttons than actual peep-holes. The film’s use of CGI and saccharine visuals do not better immerse us in a child’s fantasy, but reduce the experience of such to a nostalgic relic that is forever lost. For instance, during (yet another) tea party sequence, Pooh and Tigger appear caked in layers of dust, the environment is drenched in a sludge of sepia, and a melancholy orchestra saps the scene of its joyf. This impression of loss would be fine if it corresponded to the film’s message; instead, Christopher Robin insists that adults can, in fact, retrieve their childhoods. Though it gestures toward a compelling statement on the disappearance of that naiveté perhaps crucial to children’s movies, the film lacks the conviction to successfully carry out this theme, and, as a result, dawdles in its own indecision.

If films like Christopher Robin and Alice retain some of the exaggerated designs of their traditionally animated forebears even as they coat their characters in a veneer of hyperrealism, then The Lion King presents the logical step forward: It substitutes the iconic models of the 1994 original with generic renderings

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

of animals akin to ones you would find in the Museum of Natural History. By constructing a more precise approximation of a reality in which animals can speak (and vaguely reenact the plot of Hamlet), director Jon Favreau offers little room for the audience to invest the characters with their own imaginative capacity. For the purpose of The Lion King, Favreau’s special effects team even invented a new form of VR ‘motion capture’ that aimed to create convincing CGI with “the shaky-cam look of a handheld camera.” Shaky-cam, a form of cinematography meant to replicate the atmosphere of home-movies, tends to privilege the realism of the event being depicted over formal dramatic conventions. It suggests a sense of distrust toward spectacular presentation, even when the subject matter (such as talking lions) obviously falls under the umbrella of the spectacular. The conversation between Simba and Scar over the former’s future inheritance comes off as vacuous, without the conspiratorial intrigue that the original’s expressive animation may have engendered. When the film tries so hard to convince us of its ludicrous anthropomorphisms, the fantasy which made such ludicrousness compelling in the first place vanishes.

Despite all of their visual posturing, on a narrative and thematic level Disney remakes still behave as children’s movies would—sometimes, even more childishly so. It should not be ignored that traditional Disney ‘classics’ explicitly advocate for a code of moral conduct and behavior that does not hold up by today’s measurements. At the same time, these films do not forcefully handhold the viewer through the statements they are trying to make, but tend to present the conflicts in perspective as farcical. In comparison, the remakes authorize their moral judgements through dramatic stakes and sympathies that appear shallow, as though they are coddling the audience. A conspicuous instance of this can be traced back to Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, when a bobble-headed Helena Bonham Carter orders one of her frog servants to be executed for stealing her tart. The low angles, slowed editing, dramatic drop in music, and punchy acting all compel the viewer to fear the Red Queen and sympathize with the frog who had been unjustly indicted. In comparison, the original film’s analog to this scene depicts the declaration of execution as rather quotidian: it is performed with an upbeat musical number, as though to suggest the Red Queen’s behaviors are no more outrageous than those of the Hare and Hatter. The film levels the playing field between both parties, leaving it up to the viewer to navigate the moral landscape on their own accord, rather than directing them at every moment.

The manipulation of audience sympathies to validate a film’s dramatic integrity runs though another recent Disney remake, The Jungle Book, also directed

by Favreau. Here, the antagonist, Shreva Khan—a tiger seeking to kill a young human living in the jungle, Mowgli—is transformed from a bumbling foe that

hunts Mowgli for pleasure to a brooding and injured outcast of the jungle seeking vengeance on the boy as a representative of the human species. Favreau forfeits the villain’s wit and playfulness to authorize what amounts to a condescending moral message, which manifests most clearly in the 2016 version’s revised ending. While the original presents Mowgli fighting Shreva out of hubris, and thus emphasizes character development over an explicit message, the 2016 Mowgli performs the exact opposite gesture by refusing to fight Shreva in order to overcome the longstanding enmity between animals and humans.

Though it is well-intended, the film paints Mowgli as a messiah, and thereby indulges in a simple resolution that glides over any complexities the original conflict may have posed. When the herds of animals take Mowgli’s side to defeat Shreva, a gesture that shallowly reconciles the real issue of human and animal coexistence, one can’t help but feel patronized. This isn’t to say anything about the film’s historically oppressive subject matter (echoes of Rudyard Kipling’s imperialist legacy still resound through Favreau’s seemingly sanitized adaptation), but to point out how Disney sacrifices character-centered drama for cheap solutions to global problems. The convenient formula amounts to escapist entertainment rather than a legitimate call to action, despite vigorously presenting itself as otherwise.

As these films continue to be churned out on a seemingly monthly basis, I’m reminded of David Mitchell’s 2004 sci-fi epic Cloud Atlas, in which he envisions a future where every film is referred to as a Disney.

Mitchell’s satirical riff on corporate familism rings with surprising relevance, as cultural nostalgia for a regime of cartoons that can only be replicated cynically, without the animated magic they once possessed, wears thinner. Regardless of critics’ remake fatigue, Disney’s remake-train does not show any indication of stopping: Browsing Wikipedia, one sees at least 12 future remakes already in production. When I return to work at the theater next year, I will not be surprised to find Disney once again plastering our marquee, and original titles more conspicuously absent than ever.

TRISTAN ST. GERMAIN B’21 is still watching children's cartoons.

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BY Noa Machover & Nora Lawrence DESIGN Christie Zhong

CATERING CONTRACT CONCERNS An open letter on catering workers’ contract negotiations Since September 2018, Brown University catering service employees have been negotiating their contract with the University in an attempt to unionize.

The catering banquet captains are seeking to be represented by the United Service and Allied Workers of Rhode Island, according to Karen McAninch, the union’s business agent. USAW is the same union that represents Brown University library and facilities workers, as well as the rest of Dining.

The department has been stymied in its attempt to come to an agreement with the University, with catering negotiators citing an inability to square the demands of the contract with the reality of their job.

Without an agreed-upon, signed contract, the catering workers remain in a temporary holding pattern, neither in the Union nor out of it. In order to address unresolved matters, federal mediation has been requested.

Moreover, Brown’s partnership with the Bon Appétit Management company has coincided with shifting management structures, increased monitoring, and arbitrary policy changes. These trends suggests an underlying disinterest on Brown’s part in meaningfully factoring workers’ day-to-day realities into management and negotiations. When negotiating with catering workers, Brown needs to be more sensitive to the unique way that catering operates within the University.

One issue forms the crux of the disagreement: the University wants catering workers to clock in and out at the beginning and end of their shifts. As reasoning, the University cites consistency and fairness with the protocols of other dining units. However, according to McAninch, other dining stewards—dining employees who act as union officials representing and defending the interests of fellow employees—have provided signed letters of support to catering services in their negotiations. These letters acknowledge that the role of catering workers is distinctly different from that of the other dining services workers who currently clock in and out, and that schedule flexibility is necessary for catering operations. Ultimately, what other dining stewards recognize, as well as catering banquet captains, is that the irregular nature of catering is at odds with Brown’s contract expectations.

The highly variable nature of catering makes clocking in and out a major inconvenience for workers.

Events routinely end early or go late, and often take place at locations far from the Ratty (where they would have to clock in), such as campus’ north end or off-campus satellite locations such as the School of Public Health and the Medical School.

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Still, the University has remained obstinate on this issue. Rather than supporting catering workers by acknowledging the importance of flexibility and autonomy on the job, dining managers have proposed convoluted alternatives that ignore the workers’ main concerns. Management has suggested installing time clocks in all satellite locations and providing Zipcar accounts so that employees aren’t using their own vehicles, a solution which would add time and complication to the tasks of catering staff. Rather than trusting employees to show up for their jobs, the University is insisting on increased monitoring and surveillance.

These measures have not historically been necessary for adequate functioning of the department and will only make abiding by catering operations protocols more expensive, complicated and arduous — without adding any perceptible benefit.

These increased expectations for catering services coincide with inadequate funding for the department, resulting in fewer people and less access to equipment than ever. Dining employees in Catering and throughout the Dining department are being asked to do more with fewer resources. While catering continues to grow each year, the department struggles with growing pains due to a lack of resources, such as insufficient full-time staffing and outdated or broken equipment. Labor shortages during busier events are addressed by outsourcing labor to temp agencies.

The strains faced by catering workers have coincided with significant shifts of management in Dining Services. In September 2016, Brown Dining Services launched a partnership with Bon Appétit Management Company, an on-site restaurant company. Although catering workers are negotiating with the University, and not directly with Bon Appétit, the consulting company’s presence brought on immediate and drastic changes in working conditions for dining workers.

According to a 2017 Brown Daily Herald article, dining service workers say that Bon Appétit’s presence in BDS middle management has increasingly “brought on new responsibilities — with little change in compensation.” Workers are manning more stations than ever, and those whose roles were once limited to serving food are now expected to prepare food from scratch as well.

Bon Appétit has a history of asking the same number of employees to do more work with fewer resources, as evidenced by previous labor campaigns at Lafayette and UPenn in 2013, WashU in 2017, Oberlin in 2018, and several other universities. At Oberlin, for example, patterns emerged of undertraining and

inappropriate conduct on the part of Bon Appétit’s managers, as well as disregarding the experiences and talents of dining service workers in favor of generic policies implemented by frequently rotating managers. As generic policies and shifting managerial practices emerge, certain workers fear that Bon Appétit’s practices at Brown will be no exception. Peter Rossi, managing director of Dining Services, has left his current position at the University. Additionally, several mid-level employees in Brown’s Main Dining Room have either left or accepted a job demotion. As these relatively swift changes occur, there is concern throughout the department that Brown University management is slowly being replaced by Bon Appétit.

These managerial changes are affecting the current unionization negotiations. While the company is not directly involved in negotiations, their presence informs what the future of dining will look like. Rather than preferencing top-down managerial measures, Brown needs to be more sensitive to the unique way that catering operates within the University.

In the past couple of years, the University’s partnership with Bon Appétit has made it harder for workers to do their jobs. Yet the current catering negotiation standstill has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of the Brown community. Despite the fact that catering services are present at events throughout campus and play an essential role in the day-to-day functioning of the university, the 10-person department has historically been invisible to students and the broader university community. Students should be aware of these ongoing struggles for justice in our community. As students who rely on the labor of Brown’s employees, we urge the University to meaningfully include workers in the decisions that affect their daily operations.

This letter was originally published online at Uprise RI. NOA MACHOVER B’19.5 and NORA LAWRENCE B’19, two members of Brown Student Labor Alliance, want you to support local workers’ struggles.

20 SEP 2019

home / land

ancestors looking down

murmuring potential futures in the earth in our bodies

a prophecy of nopal cactus forests

my abuelita revealed to me in a summer Texas daydream THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Friday 9.20

RI #ClimateStrike - Burnside Park - 10AM - 6PM

Make like our resident climate baddie Greta Thunberg and demand immediate action in response to the climate crisis! Hundreds of fellow Providence residents will be meeting at Burnside park at 10am to march to the state house—and, that too, just three days before the Emergency UN Climate Summit in New York.

If you’d rather not march, come directly to the State House at 12:45 to strike. Work refusal has never been more urgent…

Sat 9.21

Mon 9.23

Business & Entrepreneurship for the Creative Professional - Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship - 5-6:30PM

We can all take a deep breath knowing that with the introduction of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship at Brown, residents of 257 Thayer—the Center’s immediate neighbor—will truly be able to work, live, and play all on one of Providence’s most dynamic street corners. Come to the East Side’s newest innovation district to hear Jonathan Wolffe, the composer of none other than Seinfeld’s “Bum ba dum bum bup dum da dada” speak about uh, entrepreneurship?

Ocean State Oyster Fest - Waterplace Park - 1-7PM

Farm Machinery & Tractor Safety - Southside Community Land Trust - 4-6:30PM

Were y’all ever traumatized by the walrus in Alice in Wonderland? Well, now’s your chance to perform some role reversal. Imbibe in his ruthless gluttony and pry open some oysters, peruse the food trucks, and take a swing at the infamous shucking contest. Callooh, callay, we’ll eat today, like cabbages and kings.

Wed 9.25

This event’s promotional literature offers a terse and ominous message: Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world because of tractor accidents.

Need we say more?

Sun 9.22

Moor Mother at Columbus Theatre https://www.facebook.com/events/375086199815059/

Ah, Providence Flea, Brooklyn Flea’s tragic younger sister, both of them the bastard child of Paris’ original Les Puces (how we long!). Here, you’ll find all of RI’s artisanal staples (soap, jewelry, macrame plants, that sort of thing...). Try your luck rooting around—this listwriter got an original Benny’s sign here. RIP.

Camae Ayewa (a.ka. Moor Mother) is poet, community organizer, performer, philosopher, experimental music maker—the list goes on. Her music moves from cataloguing historical trauma to dwelling on the present-day carceral state to weaving her own speculative futures. Listening to Moor Mother is maybe like listening to time itself: absolutely sublime. Tickets are $17.

PVD flea - South Water St. by the pedestrian bridge - 10AM-4PM

Thurs 9.26

Hannibal Buress at Strand Theatre 8-11PM https://www.facebook.com/events/915248098833595/

Hannibal Buress is maybe the last funny cis dude left— and he’s coming to pvd. If you can nab a ticket, do.

This is… the next best thing since moving to Philly and starting a noise band.

ARE YOU AN EMMA, CLEO, OR RIKKI? TWEET @THEINDY_TWEETS