The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 4

THE INDY*

11 A POSSESSION FOR THE PORCUPINE 13 THE “PLIGHT” OF A MAJORITY 15 FOX POINT MANOR TENANTS SPEAK OUT

Volume 43 Issue 04 8 October 2021

THE INTERACTIVE ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

00 “GREEN ECOSYSTEM”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

02 WEEK IN PUZZLES

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Sedona Cohen

Alisa Caira, & Asher White

03 HYDROLOGICAL CITY LIFE

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss

Ricardo Gomez

05 CROSSWORD

ARTS Edie Elliott Granger Nell Salzman

Maya Polsky

06 ART HIGHLIGHT: TACTILE FORMS Sylvia Atwood, Gemma Brand-Wolf, & Joshua Koolik

07 THE SIMPLE LIFE Kenney Nguyen

09 “ARCHIVES - DRAWER 36” Quinn Bentley

13 THE “PLIGHT” OF A MAJORITY Swetabh Changkakoti & Anushka Kataruka

15 FOX POINT MANOR RESIDENTS SPEAK OUT

LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan

17 “KIDS”

Lucy Lebowitz

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

18 BULLETIN BOARD

ALUMNI RELATIONS Gemma Sack

From the Editors It’s a Friday, and the season’s fall. As do the leaves. As does the sun, before we can even return home for the day. Last week we left the house with no umbrella, forgetting that the rain is no longer a welcome surprise but rather a bitter cold, one that has us rummaging through closets in search of retired layers.

My mom likes to say “it’s too hot for hugs!” when I try and hold her in the summertime.

We’re sticky and sweaty enough already, she’ll mumble. To which I say, nonsense, but of course, she always wins. So it’s a Friday, the season’s fall, and I welcome the cold that huddles us together under a shared umbrella and layers of my grandma’s quilts, the cold that prompts my dad to make us homemade hot chocolate, that has my mom chasing me around the house to heat her cold fingers in my warm hand.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony

Hanna Aboueid & Kolya Shields

-IA

METRO Isabelle Agee-Jacobson Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

BULLETIN BOARD Dylan Lewis Lily Pickett Aida Sherif

Maru Atwood

As I prepare for months of cracked lips and dry skin, I schedule my next hair braiding appointment. Even in the frost, there remains something that I can tend to. I think of the weather, but feel instead the cool chill of cocoa butter smoothed across my scalp. I hear my mother’s voice after a particularly vicious tug because “beauty is pain, nwane m.” Each part and pull melts together now, in a long succession of weekend afternoons spent sitting between her legs as she shielded my coils from the cold.

The season’s fall, and I am away, but this layer of protection only pulls us together.

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff

11 A POSSESSION FOR THE PORCUPINE

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Volume 43 Issue 04 8 October 2021

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DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Peder Schaefer Ivy Scott XingXing Shou STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Bowen Chen Jack Doughty Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Tammuz Frankel Leo Gordon Rose Houglet Jana Kelly Nicole Kim Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Rhythm Rastogi Issra Said Kolya Shields Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Rebecca Bowers Swetabh Changkakoti Jenna Cooley Megan Donohue Elizabeth Duchan Jayda Fair Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Anushka Kataruka Madison Lease Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Addie Marin Kabir Narayahan Eleanor Peters Janek Schaller Gracie Wilson Xinyu Yan

DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Lola Simon Jieun (Michelle) Song Sam Stewart Floria Tsui Sojung (Erica) Yun Ken Zheng WEB DESIGN Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sage Jennings Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Yukti Agarwal Sylvie Bartusek Gemma Brand-Wolf Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Luca Colannino Michelle Ding Quinn Erickson Sophie Foulkes Camille Gros Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Kenney Nguyen Xing Xing Shou Joyce Tullis BUSINESS Jonathan Goshu Daniel Halpert Isabelle Yang — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

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

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

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

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Scrambles 1 ASNGRNTATEAR 2 LDSE EZOFNR OLDENEAM 3 HWTA ECRHE 4 NAHETEUMA 5 EMRATNPDET FO HLTEAH RYTAEESCR NLEICO NXERELADA-COTST

Week in Connect the Dots

Week in Mister

During Hot _______ (gender) Summer, many in ________________ (underrated New England city) and beyond found themselves reconnecting with their

innermost desires, no matter how _______ (adjective). After a year of quarantine, who doesn’t give in to a little _______ (Seven Deadly Sin)? I, for one,

decided to take a trip down to ___ (mammal) Point’s own ______ (professional title) Sister, a noted ______ (nighttime activity) shop offering all sorts of

_________ (product) and _______ (indulgence) to fulfill your desire for ______________ (fantasy).

From the moment I arrived, a __________ (adjective) cashier named ________ (male name, generic) eyed me as I passed through the aisles. As my fingertips lightly ____(verb, past tense) each box in the display, I felt an overwhelming sense of ______________ (instinct, visceral).

I couldn’t even begin to choose: a __________ (product) shaped like a __________ (sea animal)? Or perhaps one with the colors of the _______________

(Scandinavian country) flag? Instead of choosing, I decided to see how many _________ (product) I could __________ (verb) at once. Suddenly—with

_________________ (number 1-10) in my _______________ (body part)— I remembered I was the only person in the store. __________________ (awkward guy name) the __________ (adjective) cashier glared at me from behind his __________ (piece of furniture).

After remembering my nascent __________ (more specific noun) kink, I put down the __________ (products). I was__________ (emotion) to find

that __________ (length of time, ranging from a few minutes to eternity) had already passed. I decided to imagine a scene in which I would use the

__________ (product) in order to decide if the __________ (adjective) __________ (sea animal) __________ (object) or __________ (adjective) __________ (Scandinavian political figure) __________ (oblong object) would be better suited to my needs.

But alas, each __________ (product) was either too __________ (adjective) or too __________ (adjective) for my __________ (deep human need). Needless to say, I left empty-__________ ed (bodypart).

Week in Picture This

What are these symbols saying? Write your guesses down and check the answers at the bottom of the page.

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10 PICTURE THIS: 1. Fox Point; 2. Coffee Milk; 3. Buddy Cianci; 4. Superman Building; 5. Swan Point Cemetery; 6. College Hill; 7. Rhode Island; 8.

Brown University; 9. Smith Hill; 10. Olneyville New York System SCRAMBLES: Naragansett; 2. Del’s Frozen Lemonade; 3. What Cheer; 4. Athenaeum; 5. Department of Health Secretary Nicole Alexander-Scott

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 4

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TEXT RICARDO GOMEZ

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

METRO

Hydrological City Life

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On infrastructure, water, and storytelling; an interview with public scholar Sam Coren.

Raised in Cranston, Rhode Island, Sam Coren is a public scholar and creative practitioner with deep family connections to Providence and its entangled landscapes. Coren’s creative work has been exhibited at sites in Providence and New York with a thematic focus on distressed landscapes. Crucially, Coren’s understanding of space as always in flux breaks down the sense that Providence’s ongoing experiences of climate degradation carry the weight of finality. Their ongoing dissertation project, titled Watershed Metropolis, explores people’s relationships to Rhode Island’s urban rivers in a 50 year history.

By attending to the ways that infrastructure of different scales—from bioswales to highways— mediates people’s relationships to the city, Coren’s research provokes a reconsideration of how urban space creates a sense of community, treating water as a meaningful social actor which weaves together people’s daily experiences of city life.

Entering their research through creative practices of observation and poetry, Coren shares stories that amplify a sense of connection to people and places in Rhode Island.

RG: What sorts of questions have animated your public scholarship and creative practices?

SC: It gives me pause, it makes me think, because I can’t say in a straightforward kind of way why a lot of my research and creative work has centered on Providence and the urban landscape around it.

It’s a kind of relationship that alternates between feeling too familiar or almost to the point of boredom, but then with bursts of intense wonderment and surprise. I was getting close to starting on a dissertation and my partner asked me, “where does Providence get its drinking water?”

I knew that it came from the Scituate Reservoir, but I felt like my understanding of the infrastructure and the roots of water… Well, I knew almost nothing.

These hydrological systems are extensions of ourselves so it’s really hard to say where we end and they begin, forming one kind of organism, you could say, where we make up a whole living system. It’s strange, in other words, to be part of a system, part of a living system, and yet know so little about it. I kept wondering about who gains power from our lack of knowing, and how our lack of knowing diminish[es] our sense of connection or sense of belonging to place and to landscape.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

There’s endless interest for me in learning more about Providence and what makes it unique, because the more I learn about it the more I feel like I’m opening into dimensions of my own history, personhood, and community that have not been obvious.

RG: How does the way you ask questions change as you shift in and out of different positions— from public scholar to artist?

SC: Well, my first way of trying to connect and communicate the experience of place was through verse, through poetry, and through spoken word.

That was what really inspired me for years. So my approach hasn’t been totally research driven per se. It was more like, let me sit in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot at three in the morning, and read about this willow tree and from there develop more, tapping into a layer of a felt sense of place.

I still feel like that’s where I personally draw the most inspiration—from walking, from observing, from listening, and just being grounded. The AS220 exhibition I did was pretty unique and a lot of fun and came from having worked pretty hard at writing a master’s thesis but feeling like there was so much that I wasn’t able to say. There’s so much spill over. There’s so much that it feels so incomplete, so I did the exhibition as a way of finding an outlet for that spillover and for all those open ended questions thinking about the strangeness of maps and blueprints. [...] You can look at a thousand urban planning documents around the Providence River noting dimensions and you can see land use along the edges and so on and so on, but no matter how much you look at that stuff, it doesn’t bring you closer to knowing a place right in a bodily sense, in an experiential sense.

Isn’t that weird? [Urban planning maps] don’t store—they don’t reproduce experience—they just structure it.

RG: Based on your background with collaborative media projects like Providence Waterways, can you talk to us about the importance of storytelling for RI’s rivers and ecologies? How has storytelling been important for environmental and economic activism in Providence?

SC: I had a chance this summer to work with a group called Doors Open RI on a story map. It was all about getting stories from people who live around the area [and] creating a kind of collage of different experiences. For example, [...] my mom’s dad worked as a sanitation worker. He worked on the trucks picking up trash around the city but eventually he was transferred to the incinerator around the Fields Point area in South

Providence. He would walk to work every day, and she would follow him as a child through patches of remnant forest and in weedy places. There was a hill down by Fields Point—which is the industrial waterfront in South Providence—they called Salamander Hill because salamanders would run up and down. So those kinds of stories of what used to be, or what could be, again, if we had a different kind of relationship to the land, really fascinate me. I have these new kinds of reference points [that are] parking lots now, but [I ask] did you know that this used to be a pond or used to be the Moshassuck River? In one of the Algonquin languages, Moshassuck means “where the moose drink.” But now the river is one of the most degraded rivers in the city and you can’t even access [it]. It’s not just about the past, it’s not just “that’s how it was for hundreds of years.” Why should the [most recent years of degradation] have the weight of inevitability? Hearing stories about what needs to be is also a way of opening up to a possible future.

RG: One watershed story we could talk about has to do with the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier... In 1954, a storm surge from Hurricane Carol broke the banks of the Providence River and flooded the streets of downtown. A central thread I’ve seen in your writing online has to do with ecological crises and their increasing frequency. How does the constant threat of crisis inform your research and impressions of how Providence is doing?

When you look at the hurricane barrier and rising water levels, what kinds of stories are becoming more urgent to share?

SC: Yeah, so I was reading this article by Kyle Whyte, [who] writes about crisis epistemology.

When there is a sense of crisis, it is often used to justify violence. That is, crisis is often a means of reproducing colonial logic and the violences that comes with colonial logic. For example, when people say that the water is going to rise three feet and it’s going to happen in 10 years,

METRO they make it sound like there is an inevitability of some people getting left behind. In this way, crisis justifies making changes, making them “now,” and rushing goals of, say “building a sea wall” or unbuilding a neighborhood by any means necessary. Well, that kind of urgency can just reproduce old ways of thinking. [Whyte] talks about how instead of an epistemology of crisis, we need an epistemology of coordination. It seems to me that involves slowing down. [...] I feel like the beauty of a person-to-person level knowledge of landscape and local ecologies is very plural. People sharing stories is not uncoordinated, but it’s not a master plan. You might only see grass and trees here along the river, but actually there’s verbena and mint and all these different plants that are medicinal and edible and serve the purpose of retaining stormwater so it doesn’t flow into the bay.

Seeing what’s already here through storytelling at a person to person kind of level opens people’s imaginations, maybe provokes them to think differently about the city, and I think that’s really important to make everyone feel included in shifts toward adapting changes in our landscape and climate. Like, yes you need money and you need central planning around certain infrastructures, like the hurricane barrier, but just as important is creating more points of public access to the waterfront. More public access and more community control of what gets built needs imagination.

Because the more you create a sense of belonging and a sense of agency—I don’t want to say ownership but agency—then the more people are going to care about the “environment.” So our responses need to be about democratizing the use of shared landscape and public space.

RG: Just further up from the barrier, The Providence River Bridge, which was part of a network of statewide highways, was demolished in 2009 after about 50 years of use. And in 2019, ten years after the demolition, the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge opened as a central component in the city’s plans to transform the waterfront for public access. How can or should we tell the story of this development? Despite recent changes, how can we think of this area as a distressed landscape?

SC: I think what comes to mind has to do with how restoration can lead to gentrification and rising property value right along green corridors along river fronts. I would love to see a situation where [restoration projects] are planned, but we’re [also] going to create a new public access point along the waterfront. That’s going to be in the hands of say, the planning department, and in the parks department, but we’re also going to make sure that there are some protections in place around that new park and that new public access point so that property values don’t skyrocket and create a wave of displacement. That’s what’s more the case in Providence, where what gets built is luxury rental housing without thinking about how development impacts lower and middle class residents. That’s what I would say is left out [of the waterfront development narrative]. We want to see formal protections to make sure that greening the city doesn’t also doesn’t gentrify the city.

RG: I recently read an op-ed you co authored that touched on the Climate Justice Plan and the notion that Providence is already a laboratory for sustainable, grassroots urbanism. What can you say about grassroots organizing today? What are important pillars around which people are organizing?

SC: I think Providence has a very vibrant local food movement and it’s fairly diverse and grassroots. Also, what’s most promising to me is what’s coming out of the climate justice plan and how

that’s slowly changing the larger discourse around sustainability. But then there’s also so many people doing stuff off the radar. For example, there’s a big fight over Kennedy Plaza right now.

I don’t know if you’re tuned into that at all? [see: Metro’s piece in the Indy Vol. 41 Issue 4]

“Why should the [most recent years of degradation] have the weight of inevitability?

Hearing stories about what needs to be is also a way of opening up to a possible future.”

RG: Yes. Public spaces like KP or even the Superman building are really important sites of reconsidering democratic control while planning ecologically.

SC: Yeah, it’s about a sense of agency and access.

Because if you don’t know that, for example, you live 500 feet from a river because it’s behind a guardrail, or a supermarket, or a parking lot, how do you even begin to care about what you don’t know is there? Part of what I’m researching for the dissertation is underneath Providence. There’s this system of tunnels called the combined sewage overflow tunnels. They store a combination of sewage and stormwater runoff underground until the treatment plant at Fields Point is able to treat that water. They just started operating, I think 10 years ago. For 100 years before that, maybe longer, the upper Bay was so badly polluted with heavy metals and sewage that shellfishing beds were closed and a lot of the fish that traditionally migrate through those waters started to disappear. Since the overflow tunnels however, the water in the Bay has gotten so much cleaner.

People who are involved in the ecology of the area say that on many days it’s swimmable. Most people don’t know anything about the tunnels, and, if they lived here a long time, probably still assume that the bay and the Providence River are dirty and bereft of marine life. It’s very hard to feel how you’re entangled in all of it.

and municipal debt in the face of persistent structural inequalities?

SC: Providence, like a lot of rust belt cities [or] older urban centers in the US, is just constantly broke and constantly trying to make things happen with not enough money. It’s been that way a long time. In that sense, there’s a lot that the city just can’t do because it doesn’t have the tax base to do so. In that sense, the greater the debt, the more the city as an agent, as a power structure, shrinks. Obviously its political boundaries haven’t changed very much but it’s power to make things happen has diminished greatly and continues to diminish over time. The Scituate reservoir was built in the 1910s and 20s, and to build it the city of Providence bought up multiple villages in some Western towns of Rhode Island—farm towns and mill towns—where the city evicted everyone, flooding the whole area to create a reservoir. It was a massive public works project. The reservoir watershed is bigger than the city. The kind of power it would take for a municipality to buy that much land and flood it, creating these pipes, might be unimaginable today. In the past five or six years, the city was actually entertaining the idea of privatizing or selling the reservoir, selling the public drinking water supply to meet its pension obligations and other debts. It just goes to show how far the city has fallen in terms of its power to shape the landscape to provide these services.

Debt is clearly a big problem and it often becomes a way for transferring power/control of basic services that make life possible over to private or semi public agencies that are beyond the purview of the city. That has consequences for a democracy, because your representatives no longer have any say over your drinking water.

To be fair, Providence still owns the drinking water supply, but, broadly speaking, in places like Flint, Michigan, or New York City, there are trends towards the privatization of formerly public infrastructures. Not only do you not have access or knowledge of the infrastructures that make urban life possible, but they are now in the hands of private entities who have greater power than elected representatives.

RG: When we extend our thinking past the waterfront, taking into account Pawtucket, Central Falls, Cranston, and Warwick, we encounter a lot of different layers of infrastructure connecting these places. How does infrastructure mediate people’s relationships between our water systems and sense of community?

SC: Well, for example, Patuxent River feeds the Scituate Reservoir, which provides drinking water to all those other cities. In terms of where it is relative to Providence (the city), the reservoir and Pawtuxet river are not even within city lines. It’s all in the suburbs in the rural areas that that particular river runs through. And yet, it is the only drinking water for the city. So it’s a strange disconnect that you could live on the Woonasquatucket River in Olneyville with abundant fresh water right outside your door, and yet your drinking water comes from elaborate systems of pipes, delivering water from way beyond the city limits. It’s a matter of what you could call a scalar displacement. Your realm of concern, that which gives you life and immediate place, is extended beyond what you can immediately perceive and feel and comprehend. We all live in multiple places simultaneously. It’s not only about hydrological infrastructure, it’s really about food and it’s about the possibility of having close relationships with people far away thanks to communications technology. It’s all these different infrastructures that layer up to create a sense of being present in multiple dimensions, entangled with others.

RG: Can you talk to us about how your research addresses the problems of aging infrastructure

RG: As we continue to tell stories about Providence and Rhode Island cityscapes, how can our writing and storytelling change so as to include the perspectives of fish, birds, plants, and water itself as social agents?

SC: I’m still learning from myself exactly how! I’m just beginning to write this dissertation project, and I’m really trying to slow down and account for all these different people, nonhuman people, in our midst. I think the first step is just noticing, and that takes some work when, for example, you’re coming up in a kind of standardized education system that doesn’t really offer you any kind of working knowledge of the place in which you live. I’m not the person to make recommendations around education because I don’t know much about it, but I would love to see a curriculum including more knowledge of local ecologies. It’d be wonderful, for example, if elementary school kids were introduced to the creation stories of local Indigenous people. Just having that knowledge, receiving that knowledge at a formative age…I wonder how it would structure how people experience and think about where they live.

RICARDO GOMEZ B’22 is diagramming bioswales.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 4

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Aegean and Sargasso, for two Snooze You might take two if you have an 8-down Travelled "Girlfriend in a ___"; song by The Smiths Pancake, to Jacques Jason's ship Final chapt.? "_____ journey"; Odyssey Dangerous doings Type of shower "Without a ____"; broke Healthy, in Havana "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" rapper On the market, as a house Air and Pro Commit diamond theft?

Something to stake Partner of nothing

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50 Like Greenland, surprisingly 53 Wafting whiffs 58 Democrat duo 61 "Set Fire to the Rain" singer 63 Mule, for one 64 African sheep 65 Sunbathes 66 Demon barber of Fleet Street 67 Miles per gallon or beats per minute 68 Cockatoo topper 69 In Morse code, it's ...---...

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Colleague of Mead and White Dress with flare Mandarin alternative They keep you off the streets Pipe bend Kara Walker, for RISD Sun. follower Banking agency founded by FDR Shirked, as taxes Xi Jinping's nat Skin maladies, sometimes Exclamation, or website logo with an exclamation point Lunch Poems poet Work by Rivera or Siquieros, maybe Less than right They're "marmalade," per John and Paul Tree house Tacit yeses It's easy as one, two, three To give: Spanish

answer key can be found on page 18

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS This week, Arts chose to highlight three student artists, focusing on their work with tactile forms, creative processes, and motivations.

The Four of Diamonds, 2021 10’ x 4.5’ Faux fur, synthetic leather, felt, satin, cardboard, hot glue

Glom, 2020 24” x 32” Acrylic paint, spray paint, seran wrap, oats, rice crispies, steel wool, sponge, lemon peels, sugar, broom hairs, coffee stirrers, foam, masking tape, hot glue, cotton, pom poms, polymer clay

The body moves to sculpt a still body, to capture in stillness its motion; this intricate combination of movement and stillness constitutes the central power of sculpture.

In three-dimensionality, sculpture demands that both the sculptor and the viewer move.

The process of sculpting (as the artist moves to capture the subject) is a dance which choreographs the reception. The sculptor’s movement is traced by the audience.

Dancer, choreographer, and scholar Susan Leigh Foster writes that “the writing body listens and waits as fragments of past bodies shimmer and then vanish.” In this sculpture, fragments of a past body constitute the sculpted body. They do not shimmer and then vanish, but shimmer infinitely, evincing the performance of memory and demanding that the viewer engage in their dance.

- GEMMA BRAND-WOLF

- SYLVIA ATWOOD Play Things, 2021 30” x 30” x 8” Aluminum foil, wire mesh, plaster, steel wool, wool, cotton, hot glue, masking tape, cardboard, wire

Four Selfies, 2020 Stoneware, blue stain

Serve, 2020 Wood-fired stoneware

As an artist, the question of why it is worthwhile to create at all feels always present.

Especially in ceramics—where clay (which is dug up from the ground) must undergo the irreversible and energy-intensive process of firing in order to become another object in our already crowded lives—this question persists.

Ceramics is receptive to the body. Using simple forms brings out subtleties in the way the clay has interacted with the artist and helps generate objects which are more relatable to a viewer. With a slow and repetitive process of construction, the conscious mind loses the need to interfere so that the physical body and subconscious can take over. Once fired, the object is solidified as a document of information otherwise difficult to record or access.

Images sourced from mostly the internet (instagram, google, and tinder in these works) adorn the surfaces.

A move away from asking too many questions during the process of making gives space for more elusive ideas to come though.

So, why create? Maybe it has something to do with keeping a record or slowing down and digesting information or making things for others to interact with.

Tinder Picture, 2020 Porcelain, blue stain

TEXT/ILLUSTRATION SYLVIA ATWOOD, GEMMA BRAND-WOLF, & JOSHUA KOOLIK

Fault Lines, 2019 Clay

How do abstract ideas manifest materially, and what are the differences between how we engage with objects in space versus ideas in our heads? What are the value judgments inherent to these different categorizations? This work asks questions about the role of materiality in our world today, but also offers a space for honest play and appreciation for the act of making.

DESIGN MICHELLE JIEUN SONG

Sensory objects have magical powers. They refuse logic, offer no exploitable benefit, and yet remain essential to a world otherwise obsessed with efficiency and profit. As we face issues such as climate change, systematic racism, rampant corruption and more, it is easy to doubt the role of painting and sculpture. Yet the simple act of making or experiencing an object or physical environment continues to retain its importance to the human experience.

The work in this show deals with the intersection of materiality and play. These ideas share a mutual refusal to conform to a productive model. They are also tied in their importance to us despite of, or perhaps because of this trait. Tactility can excite one’s senses automatically, triggering unexplainable emotional responses. Playing with texture, color, light, and weight invites reference and can bring viewers to a childlike state of imagination and wonder. Our first ventures into imaginary worlds were made possible through physical objects (toys, dolls, game pieces) that acted as portals to worlds full of surprise, humour, and creativity.

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Something must be said about the unparalleled feeling of unified hedonism that arises from the Timbaland-produced “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado. Once the rhythmic percussion drops, you immediately feel nostalgic. It’s the kind of energy that makes you want to drop everything—your ass to the ground included. When I returned to Brown my junior year, it was the first song I heard being blasted on the Main Green as I saw a sea of scarf tops, low-rise jeans, and shield sunglasses. Upon this sight, I got the urge to drop an “xD” on my MySpace page, experience the technological marvel that was the Motorola Razr, and feel the luxury of Juicy Couture velour tracksuits. Of course, nostalgia tints everything through rose-colored glasses (you know, like those tiny shield ones Paris Hilton would wear to an MTV Spring Break).

That being said, I can’t help but notice that the resurgence of Y2K is fueled by freshmen who were a few years too late to witness the zenith of iTunes. In a sense, they are trying to revive moments of which they only have symbols, while I am reliving my own memories. They’re reviving low-rise jeans but don’t know the experience of going with their cousin to the local mall and helping her pick a pair out from Limited Too! They’re trying to revive the aughts with butterfly clips that I remember stepping on in the middle of Claire’s. I feel a special connection in this techno-nostalgia. Although they didn’t have the memories I did, it’s heartwarming to see the spiritual revival of my youth.

Amidst this discourse of Neptunes’ production of yesteryear, I also remember the alienation I felt to pop culture. I couldn’t relate to the masc-targeted adolescent media (think X Games, pop-punk, and “that’s what she said” jokes), but I could relate to the femme-targeted media on liking boys, fashion, and pop culture. For

TEXT, DESIGN, & ILLUSTRATION KENNEY NGUYEN

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instance, it may seem trite when Britney Spears says “I feel like talking, feel like dancing when I see this guy,” but to me, she was preaching gospel that I couldn’t echo in public. She was verbalizing my taboo inner thoughts. Because I was a guy, I was expected to sing along to Timbaland’s parts of “Promiscuous,” but what if I wanted to sing Nelly’s?

We were living in a society that failed to consider representation for those who did not fit its norms. If they were represented, they were ridiculed. The times were rooted in a superficial interpretation of gender, even more so than today. Hell, this was a time in which society plastered the term “metrosexual” on every tabloid possible because it could not handle the idea of a well-groomed straight man (sorry, David Beckham). It could, however, grapple with the idea of a masculine straight woman, hence the term “tomboy” (think Jen Masterson from 6teen). This was a girl who wasn’t lambasted for her lean into the boy world, and whose sexuality was never in question as a result. In fact, it made her more attractive to men that she was able to discuss the latest Vans Warped Tour lineup. As such, it was natural that an effeminate boy like me would think that the natural opposite would be a “tomgirl” and it would be equally well-received. Needless to say, it was not—rather than being the star attraction, I was the freakshow of the second grade playground.

However, I heard gospel in the sweet sounds of dial-up internet. A portal of possibility, otherwise known as a desktop computer, was hidden in my family storage room. Connected to that mystical machine was a screaming banshee that would use my house’s home phone lines to access the World Wide Web. However, with every obnoxious beep I was seconds closer to liberation. Compared to now, where data mining is king and every aspect of your identity is investigated and collected as a metric, those days truly

felt like a glittery digital church for anonymous gender exploration. What made tech of the time so magical was that it truly didn’t matter what anything was outside of the browser. Nowadays, your face is on Zoom, your Facebook knows everything about you, and TikTok can predict what you want to see. Back then, however, the internet was a sandbox that you could play with however you see fit, and then cover your tracks when you’re done. I chose to build a sandcastle and made myself queen.

Ashlee Simpson - Pieces of Me.mp3 My guru to the McBling era, and by proxy early internet usage, was my cousin Julie. She showed me the joyful wonders and deceptive horrors of the internet, spending equal time immersing me in colorful MySpace pages and watching cartoon chipmunks get beaten in Happy Tree Friends.

However, every now and then, when rushing to hang out with her friends, she would accidentally leave the computer still logged on to our free AOL hours. So, while she was hitting up the local mall, I left to hide and find a mall of my own.

Luckily, my family allowed me to be a sinner in secret, emphasis on the secret. Growing up poor, my family could never support my budding interest in fashion dolls, but they knew that free McDonald’s toys were the next best thing.

On the box of my weekly Happy Meal, I noticed EverythingGirl.com advertising a series of dress-up games. Naturally, I decided to explore it, and the vivid shades of pink immediately appealed to me. Let’s face it, these websites were created purely to flog the brand recognition of these fashion doll lines as an extension of late-stage capitalism, but I consumed them earnestly. I wasn’t a teenager; I couldn’t just call up my nonexistent friends on my nonexistent Motorola Razr and tell them to pick me up in their nonexistent car and go to the very-existent Westminster Mall. However, I could understand what it was like to be a cool girl. In fact, there are multiple toy franchises built purely on the idea of being a cool girl. You could either look to the classic girliness of Barbie, the hip aloofness of Bratz, or the cosmopolitan glamour of MyScene.

At their core, these dolls represent an ethos of possibility: It’s possible to be anything you want (astronaut, chef, cowgirl, etc.), it’s possible to have a passion for fashion, and it’s possible to live in a dream house. Most importantly, however, it’s possible for a feminine boy to enjoy all of it and fit the mold with no judgement.

And although a doll was a distant wish, I could immediately log onto their websites and feel the fantasy without needing a hairy piece of plastic.

I found comfort in these places, in being able to go anywhere and not feel self-conscious about how I approached a space. I could be a tomgirl without the derogatory title.

As a kid, you are taught you need permission to do anything, and I felt like I did not have permission to mold my identity. I learned that it’s not possible to subscribe to a system

S+T that does not understand you, so you have to bastardize it and boil it down to its essence. So, I decided to queer heteronormative icon Barbara Thee Millicent Roberts, or Barbie if you’re nasty.

She wasn’t supposed to be for me, but I felt like she understood me. It felt like in a world where my femininity was discouraged, she was the only one who gave me permission to be feminine without caveats. I saw her as a symbol of power in femininity. As problematic as it is to frame being gay around attraction to/from boys, I wanted to understand what it meant to be desired by boys, and Barbie was unashamed of how she had Ken on a leash. On a larger scope, I wanted to know what it was like to perpetually feel a secure sense of companionship, whether it was from Ken or from her sisters. I just wanted to express my desire for love without shock and horror. In other words, I wanted to claim my sexuality through a hot pink lens. In visiting these websites, I could be feminine and creative, and most importantly, have a big-ass closet full of (virtual) designer clothes. My pixelated clothes were my babies, and my favorite children were my couture Galliano-era Dior garments.

Specifically, it was an elegant cocktail dress that looked as though it was made of vivid blue lily petals. The same could be said for any of the websites. It didn’t matter what the URL was, what shade of fuschia the background was, or what pixelated flower the cursor was shaped as; they all made me feel special and proud.

Imagination, life is our creation Looking back, it’s ironic that literal pictures of myself from the time feel faker than my animated avatars. Sure, I had my share of Bratz dolls and Barbie DVDs, but my avatars were different. Besides the absence of financial burden, I felt like I was able to live honestly. No longer was I living a carefully curated lie behind Hurley t-shirts and made-up crushes on girls (sorry, Madison). When I wanted to run for cover from the shame of the real world, I’d hide behind a firewall.

In Paris is Burning, famed drag queen Dorian Corey says, “When you’re gay, you monitor everything you do. You monitor how you look, how you dress, how you talk, how you act.” In the real world, I had to keep my true essence behind closed doors as a means of self-preservation, and I could not show my hand until I absolutely knew I was safe. Queer spaces like EverythingGirl.com made me feel safe and released my inhibitions.

In fact, this was an early extension of drag before I knew what that meant. Now, I know that drag is about playing beyond the boundaries of gender performativity and exaggerating gender expression as a means of performance, but, back then, I was just being naively creative. Looking back through a queered lens, it’s startling to see the parallels. At its very heart, drag and the ballroom culture that is intrinsic to it is tied to extravagance and glamour. If you cannot achieve some status in society, you build it with what you know. Regardless of the categories (aka themes that drag queens would need to dress for) and the level of extravagance (or lack thereof), the ballroom scene was all about wanting to physically embody escapism. You want to be a part of a society that chooses to exclude you, so you take over their vernacular and camp it up.

Like the ballroom scene, fashion was my greatest weapon against the pain of life. Sure, I could not physically buy designer gowns, but I could own them digitally and put them on a vessel of myself. On a larger scale, in a heteronormative world that prohibits expressing strength with flamboyant opulence, it was refreshing to see a figure that blends extravagance with power. Not to #GirlBoss this conversation, but in ballrooms of the time, powerful women in extravagant gowns were often emulated in the name of embodying power. This is why categories like “Dynasty” or “Executive Realness” would pop up at the balls. They

were simultaneously trying to appropriate and subvert the language of a society that refuses to label them as such, while also feeling the power of those positions in a uniquely queer way. In an environment where I had to serve Student Realness in my cargo shorts and Quiksilver t-shirts, it was refreshing to create an ambitious digital female persona who commanded power through her femininity.

In Gay Bar, author Jeremy Atherton Lin writes, “when gays are spatially scattered, they are not gay, because they are invisible.” In a time when your existence is met with scrutiny, invisibility becomes the ultimate form of liberation. It was liberating to isolate myself from the heterosexual gaze and feel the pure queer euphoria of self-expression. Barbie was celebrated for everything I was lambasted for: style, femininity, and personal pride. I couldn’t afford to wear what I wanted to wear, I wasn’t allowed to be overtly feminine, and it was systemically instilled within me that I couldn’t be proud of the way I was.

However, in creating my avatars, none of that mattered. I was able to leave my qualms outside of the computer monitor and go in as a blank doll I could dress up however I wished. If they were living in a material world, I wanted to be a material girl.

America’s Last Top Model When I heard that Adobe Flash was dying out, I went back to the websites of my youth on the final day to say a proper goodbye. Although their departure wasn’t my decision, it felt like the right time. Looking back, and reflecting on the husks of my experience, I can’t help but straddle

the line between pride and sorrow. However, in deeper reflection, I realized my online performance was more accurate than the truth because it was an intimate creation of my own. I was never physically anything that my digital character was, but she encapsulated everything I aspired to be. She lost her purpose as an escape from my loneliness, but that’s because I’m no longer lonely. I may not be plumping my lips to the extreme or becoming a CEO-yoga-instructorastronaut, but I learned through my avatars how to use my own femininity to command power.

My avatars were my own personal queer space.

If anything, queerness hinges on the idea of hope: hope that there is a better future, hope that love is possible, and hope of making your own space in society. I also like to think of nostalgia as an extension of hope. In order to stay optimistic about the future, you look back and reminisce on times in which you felt most alive. Sure, I can’t always be cosmopolitan, but my persona does not have to be tied to my physicality. As such, when I see the kids on TikTok come full circle and embrace the Bratz doll aesthetic, I feel the spirit of my avatars possess me and comfort me. Through them, I was able to feel like a cool girl, and whenever I see dance challenges that come from a Ciara deep cut, I finally get to sit at the cool girls’ table.

KENNEY NGUYEN B’22.5 is a Multi-talented Icon that is wondering which Californian landfill his MyScene™ Un-fur-gettable Kennedy doll is rotting away in…

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TEXT & ILLUSTRATION MARU ATTWOOD

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

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MARU ATTWOOD B’24 wants to know if porcupines really gnaw on dry bones.

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NEWS ILLUSTRATION NICHOLAS EDWARDS DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS TEXT SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI & ANUSHKA KATARUKA 13

THE “PLIGHT” OF A MAJORITY Hindu Victimhood at Jantar Mantar Note: This is the second in a two part series for News on political narratives of Hindu victimhood in India today. cw: anti-Muslim hate speech and extreme violence On August 8, around 2000 people—Hindu right-wing agitators, Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) members, and members of other Hindutva-adjacent organizations—rallied in support of Muslim genocide at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.

Ashwini Upadhyay, a Supreme Court lawyer and BJP spokesperson, organized this rally against “colonial-era laws,” fueling but later officially disavowing the calls to violence made at this historical protest site for dissidents that have ranged from communists to Hindu nationalists.

This event marked the culmination of a summer of similar rallies held by Hindu right-wing groups across north India, where police officers stood idly by, disregarding both the hate speech against Muslims and the blatant violations of pandemic restrictions.

A few months earlier, on May 16 of this year, a mob associated with the BJP and other local Hindu right-wing groups lynched Asif Khan, a Muslim fitness trainer, in the north Indian state of Haryana. These groups subsequently organized several mahapanchayats (village assembly meetings) across the state, leading up to a 50,000 person gathering in Indri (another village in Haryana) in defense of those arrested for the lynching, with speeches charged with Islamophobic hate speech and verbal abuse.

On June 16, unidentified men shouting Hindu slogans lynched a Muslim fruit vendor in Uttam Nagar, New Delhi, after members of the aforementioned organizations fanned communal rumours of the Muslims’ supposed redi jihad (fruit seller jihad), i.e., cheating customers and encroaching upon the territory of Hindu shopkeepers in the area.

On August 6, the same groups organized a mob of over a thousand protesters calling for Hindu unity in the face of the “Muslim threat”

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when protesting the construction of a Hajj house (a building to commemorate the annual Hajj pilgrimage) in Dwarka, Delhi. “We Hindus cannot keep suffering. Slowly, demographics will change and Muslims will dominate the country...

If a Hajj house is constructed here, terrorists will hide in it,” warned Dharmenda Singh, a member of Bajrang Dal (a militant Hindu group).

The Hindu right-wing political parties and militant groups who orchestrated these rallies are tied together by the ideology of Hindutva.

Hindutva’s largest proponent, the paramilitary volunteer organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), spawned several of these organizations (including the BJP), which are collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (literally, the family of the Sangh). First developed by V. D. Savarkar—one of the initial leading figures in Hindu nationalism—the ideology seeks to establish a Hindu political and cultural hegemony in India. Today, the Parivar dominates social and political life in the country under the BJP government. While current strands of Hindutva are conspicuously based in Hinduism, Savarkar’s Hindutva was conceived in reaction to nationwide assertions of Muslim identity during the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s. The Muslim community’s supposed rejection of a historic Indian ‘common culture’—a culture that is defined by adherence to upper-caste Hindu values—excludes them, in Hindutva’s framework, from what defines India. While public interpretations of Hindutva are varied and evolving, almost all of its forms are built on the belief that this ‘Indian’ culture is being held back from its right to dominate, revealing an embedded logic of victimization.

Nationalist leaders around the world today weaponize collective victimhood claims of majorities to garner popular support. In India, these representatives of the national majority attribute their historical ‘plight’ to those in power, repainting minority protections as preferential treatment. This narrative of collective victimhood is omnipresent in spaces dominated by Hindutva groups, particularly when we examine the events of the past few months. It frames the Muslim community as an existential threat to the ‘Hindu rashtra,’ while instigating its audience

of ‘victims’ to violence. At Jantar Mantar, a flyer emblazoned with “Annihilation of Islam” bemoaned supposed Muslim domination through “love jihad” and “terror in the name of Allah.” In Haryana, Asif Khan was lynched when a mob decided his successful gym was a ‘threat’ to the local Hindu community. In Uttam Nagar, Muslim fruit vendors were lynched after BJP leaders and other Hindutva proponents campaigned against the supposed economic threat that the vendors presented to Hindu shopkeepers in the area, with calls for an economic boycott. In Dwarka, too, Hindutva protesters gathered as a collective force against the minority to protect the majority against alleged Muslim ‘domination’ and ‘terrorism.’

Repeatedly in these instances, Hindutva proponents make direct references to what they construe as legal mistreatment and make claims to a mythical past of an untouched ‘Hindu rashtra’ to justify their Islamophobic rhetoric and actions. This language is institutionalized both within and outside government, creating avenues for its appropriation in places ranging from the Supreme Court to mob lynchings. Layering electoral politics, patriarchy, and reactionary media on top of a complex history of colonialism and subjugation solidifies this tactic of victimization that dominates communal discourse everywhere from Hindu upper-caste households to national political arenas. +++ Hindutva’s claim to victimization, at its root, was constructed using a largely incomplete and manipulated history describing centuries of Mughal rule, further complicated by 200 years of colonialism in the subcontinent. As part of their infamous “divide and rule” strategy to prevent the creation of a united anticolonial force in British India, the British reconstructed India’s history under Mughal rule along communal lines.

This reconstructed history reframed the Mughal period in India as a regressive ‘medieval’ period (naturally brought to an end by British ‘modernization’), painting the Mughal rulers as primarily Islamic rulers who invaded and plundered the region, oppressing and subjugating non-Mus-

NEWS lim communities for centuries. This, of course, was only partially true, as significant Mughal rulers like Akbar are now recognized by modern historians for ushering in an Early Modern era of Indian history, replete with celebrations of the empire’s cultural and religious diversity. However, it remains true that some rulers oppressed non-Muslims on religious grounds.

The persistence of the British retelling of this history for their own colonial agenda enabled its reproduction by Hindutva’s proponents as historical facts, weaponized within its victimization narrative for political gains. Hindutva supporters tie their alleged subjugation to their contemporary status anxiety and socio-economic problems, with claims to a pre-Muslim mythical era of Hindu glory. Brushing aside the prevalence of the caste system, they call on inspiration from this constructed past and the sanctity of their ancient land, promising supporters a return to a ‘Hindu rashtra’ as a unifying call to action against Muslims. In the “Annihilation of Islam” flyer at Jantar Mantar, they proclaimed, “The earth on which Parashurama took birth, the earth on which Rama took birth, the earth on which Krishna took birth, we freed the earth from the tyrants. All three also fought on this earth. Where did the war inside you go?” By invoking holy figures, incarnations of Lord Vishnu in Hindu mythology, this rhetoric summons a constructed nostalgia mixed with communal pride. Extrajudicial Hindutva activists reignite an apparently dormant spirit of war passed down over generations of ‘oppressed’ Hindus, to manifest yet another incarnation to fight this perpetual Muslim invasion.

In December 1992, Hindu right-wing supporters harnessed this mythology against the Babri masjid (mosque), where the Mughal emperor Babur allegedly tore down a temple dedicated to Lord Rama’s birthplace to build the mosque in its place. Subsequently, a mob took matters into their own hands and demolished the mosque with the promise of ‘rebuilding’ the temple. From the rubble of the mosque arose riots, with Hindus and Muslims attacking each other across the country, burning homes and killing thousands—marking the day as one of the darkest tragedies in India’s history. This constructed communal history was further institutionalized through judicial and executive actions of Hindu right-wing governments. The case for the construction of the temple was fought in Indian courts by Hindutva groups for decades, eventually resulting in a widely contested Supreme Court verdict validating the Hindu claim to the land in November 2019. In August 2020, the construction of the Ram temple officially commenced with an elaborate and highly publicised Bhoomi Poojan (a Hindu ritual to sanctify the land), with none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the center of the celebrations.

The oppression, occupation, and extraction of resources by the British inspired a movement to establish a common Indian identity across the subcontinent. As Hindus dominated anti-colonial discourse, this common suffering translated to the formation of a ‘Hindu’ national identity.

British attempts to regulate personal Hindu customs and westernize Indian society led to the persistence of Hindu personal law being viewed as a vital part of asserting national identity.

Thus, subsequent attempts to regulate Hindu ‘law,’ with no accompanying regulation of the customs of other religions, inflamed the Hindu sentiment that they were being targeted as a community (a sentiment fanned by the British interest in “divide and rule”), and increased resentment toward Muslims. Once communal differences sparked the Partition of India and the formation of Pakistan, leading to mass displacement and violent riots along the borders, the Muslims remaining in India were portrayed by communal groups as ‘traitors’ to the country, with Hindutva groups still using the bloody history of the Partition to justify calls to send Muslims in India to Pakistan.

This claim to historical victimization, and the hegemonic perception of Muslims as ‘foreign invaders,’ enabled the BJP’s implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019.

The CAA grants citizenship to non-Muslim

immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, claiming to protect the persecuted minorities in Muslim-dominated countries while excluding Muslim immigrants who are persecuted in India’s other neighbouring countries. Simultaneously, the NRC seeks to create a register for all citizens, which also actively identifies and excludes immigrant Muslim communities, even those whose families have been citizens of the country for decades. This blatant attack on Muslims’ rights to citizenship inspired anti-CAA/NRC protests across the country.

The Modi government responded by targeting protesters who opposed the acts, emboldening violence orchestrated by Hindutva groups like the bloody Delhi riots in early 2020. Recently, on September 23 of this year, the ‘invader Muslim’ rhetoric manifested in clashes between police and protesters, leaving two Muslims dead (both shot by policemen) and several injured during an eviction drive to remove “illegal enchroachers,” according to the Assamese Chief Minister, in a Muslim-dominated area in the state of Assam.

Hindutva’s proponents layer their collective victimhood with claims to victimization by past governments, particularly the Indian National Congress (INC), a party that held power in India for almost 60 years. This argument stems from historical evidence of calculated political actions taken by the INC for garnering votes from religious minority groups while desperately attempting to retain its image as India’s “secular” party. Hindutva groups and the BJP have used these instances as examples to portray the Hindu community, as the majority, to be under attack by the dominant national party, the Congress, for decades.

The “appeasement” of minorities rhetoric was strengthened after the Congress passed legislation which effectively nullified a Supreme Court verdict pertaining to the Shah Bano case of 1985. The case involved a dispute between a Muslim couple, resulting in an exclusively Hindu court attempting to interpret the Quran and Muslim personal law, which naturally led to outrage in the Muslim community. This was not a genuine attempt to protect the cultural identity of India’s largest minority, but simply to protect the INC’s Muslim votes. Hindu right-wing organizations instantly clamped down: They questioned the secular nature of the Congress, demanding that if Hindu traditions had been targeted and reformed (through codification of Hindu personal law in the 1950s), Muslim traditions should be subject to the same. Hence was born the BJP’s argument for the implementation for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC)—a uniform personal law applicable to all regardless of religion—implicitly arguing for hegemonic north Indian upper-caste practices to be applied across all communities in the country.

Hindutva organizations tie this political victimization to colonial suffering under the British, using decolonial language to strengthen their narrative. It was the British who attempted to simplify civil laws for different groups under generalized religious umbrellas in India. The resulting perception of the maintenance of these ‘personal laws’ as synonymous to preserving cultural identity is, therefore, a colonial construct.

Hindutva proponents also employ a ‘feminist’ rhetoric when arguing for the UCC, exploiting the delicate predicament of preserving religious personal law and promoting gender equality to attack customs and practices of religious minorities as ‘regressive’ and ‘savage’ while glorifying patriarchal gender roles themselves. Thus, all opposing arguments in favour of ‘personal laws’ or reluctance to pass a common civil code to fight against orthodox patriarchal practices provided the BJP with ample opportunity to accuse opposition parties of adhering to past ‘colonial laws’ and of being ‘anti-feminist.’ At Jantar Mantar, too, Ashwini Upadhyay called for an end to these “colonial-era laws” through a UCC in the country. +++ Hindu victimhood moves forward as India interacts with global hegemonic powers, with proponents of victimhood narratives adopting American post-9/11 narratives of Islamic extremism.

The trope of the barbaric jihadi terrorists rein-

vigorates the artillery of Hindutva supporters.

The Indian national media’s first reactions to 9/11 played into the Indian state’s interests in colonizing Kashmir and stripping its people of their agency in demanding freedom. Particularly, the media drew ideological parallels between Al-Qaeda’s role in 9/11 and Pakistan’s sponsorship of strands of Kashmiri resistance (where the latter was also self-seeking, done on the Pakistani state’s part to undermine India). This comparison gave Hindu-nationalist camps the dual rhetorical benefits of undermining Kashmiri resistance and further embedding Islamophobia in public discourse. As another immediate effect, Hindutva supporters adopted the vocabulary of ‘terror’ to frame Muslim groups as the perpetrators of violent incidents like the burning of a train in Godhra, Gujarat, in February 2002.

Hindu extremists mobilized in riots, killing 790 Muslims, according to government figures.

Other reports, including the Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report, suggest casualties exceeded 1900.

Conservative Indian news outlets, like Zee News, construct a taxonomy of conspiracies around the word jihad as understood by Hindutva organizations, which range from land jihad to redi jihad. The most sensational of these conspiracies, “love jihad,” purports that Muslim men target Hindu women, converting them to Islam through seduction and marriage, in an effort to subsume the Hindu majority (Muslims make up less than 11 percent of India’s population today). This almost formulaic means of producing victimizing narratives is tangibly dangerous, as is evident in how Hindu extremists across India have rallied and lynched people to prevent love jihad. Beyond exposing demographic growth fears in the pattern of other ethno-nationalist ideologies, love jihad also points to how proponents of Hindutva utilize existing structures of patriarchy in their narratives of victimhood.

Not only does the notion of love jihad strip the women involved of all agency, but the relative absence of outrage over Hindu men marrying Muslim women also highlights their dependence on a view of inter-religious marriage being an expression of power of one religion over the other. This conspiracy materialized legally in the form of Uttar Pradesh’s Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance in 2020, allowing the state’s police to interfere with interreligious relationships as a preventive measure for religious conversions. The love jihad narrative’s previous mechanisms of “honour killings” and intimidation laid the foundation for this new state violence by bridging violent extrajudicial actors and legal lobbyists of the same ideology while keeping them mutually unaccountable. +++ Love jihad constitutes but one example of histories being manipulated and read through other structures of domination to terrorize Muslims in India. At Jantar Mantar, people drew upon this very interaction of real and constructed histories and politics to justify calls for Muslim genocide. It is essential to recognize how this sense of Hindu victimhood, manifesting itself as Islamophobia, was spawned by British colonialism and the reactionary nationalism of India’s post-colonial nation-state. Simultaneously, proponents of Hindtuva contort these histories and fold new languages into older anti-Muslim narratives, thus revealing the core artifice of this victimhood.

It is hard to dismantle a narrative so ubiquitous, so ingrained in larger systems of Hindutva domination. There is, however, power in knowing how it operates. Recognizing how this language frames anti-Muslim visions of legislative domination in opposition to “colonial-era laws,” biopolitical control as retaliation against love jihad, and economic boycotts and physical violence against other forms of jihad or encroachment gives us space to unravel Hindutva narratives— space that is essential for directing action against these veiled goals, instead of their manipulated causes.

ANUSHKA KATARUKA and SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI B’24 want you to look up the third definition of “outfit.”

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FOX POINT MANOR TENANTS SPEAK OUT

TEXT HANNA ABOUEID & KOLYA SHIELDS

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN ILLUSTRATION XINGXING SHOU

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Harassment, neglect, and resistance in federally subsidized housing

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This past July, Fox Point Manor (FPM) tenants gathered in the basement of the local Boys & Girls Club to demand that FPM management and the Providence Housing Authority ensure them adequate housing conditions. The tenants met across the street from their homes in a basement meeting room, unable to use their own common spaces because similar meetings had been forbidden by FPM management in the past. After a decade of writing letters to elected officials detailing abuse, harassment, and neglect by Canning Management (CM), the building’s managing company, the tenants met with lawyers, public officials, and community members to share their stories and outline their vision of a better future. They emphasized the precarity of their current living situations.

Living under the perpetual threat of homelessness, they constantly fend off eviction threats and other forms of harassment by CM staff at the expense of their mental and physical health.

In fact, Gloria Isaaco, the Resident Services Coordinator, was standing outside the Fox Point Boys & Girls Club the day of the meeting, keeping track of who was entering the building. Her presence serves as a stark example of the surveillance and control CM seeks to exert over its tenants, and the challenges these tenants face when organizing against large property corporations. CM, laws that empower them, and a lack of oversight have created and upheld violent and discriminatory housing conditions for the 112 people who live in FPM. These include mental health-based discrimination, harassment, and mental abuse. FPM has also failed to provide proper and safe living conditions, with residents describing insect and rodent infestations, constantly broken elevators, unclean water, faulty home appliances, leaky roofs, and more.

The College Hill Independent talked to five tenants, attended several community meetings, and gained access to ten letters written to Manor management and local elected officials calling for help and demanding change. Tenants sent these letters to John Goncalves, Providence City Councilman. His office blacked out their names and sent them to the Indy. They date back to at least 2009, though they recount abuses that have been ongoing for at least 17 years. All of the letters reflect an ever-present urgency to the tenants’ complaints and CM’s decades-long refusal to act on residents’ demands for safe and healthy housing. Four of the letters are signed by five or more tenants, highlighting tenants’ struggle to organize to have their rights realized. Letters talk of a “culture of fear” that management have cultivated, and specifically a “fear of retribution” for tenants who give feedback and complaints. A letter to Senator Whitehouse is anonymously signed, “the tenants of Fox Point,” because, according to the letter, after a previous letter included names, they were “passed onto management by a member of [Whitehead’s] staff… [and] EACH AND EVERY PERSON WHO SIGNED THE LETTER WAS HARASSED.” FPM management have threatened and continue to threaten eviction through trumped-up letters of non-compliance.

Many of the letters are signed anonymously, and the Indy is keeping the signed letters anonymous to protect tenants’ safety. The tenants we spoke to, who continue to organize for dignity and rights, have also chosen to remain anonymous. +++ Fox Point Manor stands at the end of Wickenden Street, the constant roar of I-95 trickling into every one of its 99 units. It is part of the Hous-

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ing Choice Voucher program, better known as “Section 8 Housing,” which is a type of federally subsidized housing for families and elderly or disabled people. Unlike Public Housing, where local housing authorities get federal funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to own properties, Section 8 Housing tenants rent in the private market. The Providence Housing Authority receives money from HUD and enters into contracts with private landlords whose housing must meet requirements such as sufficient storage space, outlets, and cleanliness. Renters must be below a certain location-based income limit ($30,450 a year in Providence), and then pay at least 30 percent but not more than 40 percent of their income towards rent and utilities, with the rest subsidized.

The FPM apartments are specifically intended for elderly and disabled renters—93 percent are over 61, and 27 percent are disabled, according to 2020 Census HUD Data. The racial makeup of the apartments is similar to Providence as a whole: non-white renters make up 40 percent of the population, five percent less than the city. Multiple tenants told us that they’d “lived on the streets” before moving to FPM and that these subsidized units were the only way they could find housing. These vulnerabilities are directly connected to Brown’s real estate legacy.

Brown University’s expansion into the Providence housing market has driven up rents near College Hill and pushed more people out of Fox Point and into subsidized housing. As its name suggests, FPM is embedded into Fox Point, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that many Cape Verdean residents have been pushed out of by rising rents connected to Brown and redevelopment. In the 1950s, Brown University bought land on College Hill—expanding the university towards Fox Point, demolishing buildings to build new university structures, driving up rents, and displacing residents who had lived there for generations. Rents rose astronomically as Brown got bigger and closer to Fox Point. In the 1970s, the student population in Fox Point increased by 66 percent. This continues into today, as Brown snatches up more property on both sides of the river, from the Jewelry District to Brook Street, increasing rent prices and pushing out the most vulnerable residents. One of the tenants we spoke to, after asking if we were Brown students, emphatically told us to “tell [Brown] to stop buying property… that’s one of the things that really bugs me about you guys.”

Not being able to pay rent in a gentrifying Fox Point feeds into the power dynamics of abuse at FPM—if FPM is your only affordable option, a threat of eviction in response to complaints and organizing becomes far more impactful.

Interwoven with these long histories of gentrification and displacement, Canning Management, the building’s management company, continues to deny Fox Point Manor tenants adequate housing and neglects to address their specific concerns. Their noticeably sparse website boasts that Canning Management, based in Cranston, Rhode Island, is a “fully integrated multifamily real estate company that excels in the management of affordable and conventional housing.” CM claims to create a “culture of respect, understanding, and reciprocity,” but tenants disagree, with one writing, “I can say without reservation [that] the management have created a fear-culture.” +++ Tenants’ grievances range from inadequate

building maintenance to antagonistic and dehumanizing management. Of the ten letters the Indy obtained, five letters claimed that there was purposeful and manipulative irregular application of the rules, and all of the letters described dissatisfaction with management’s actions. For example, in a letter signed by a group of tenants, they describe how management “has been conducting spot checks wherein their staff sniff the hallways, and using a master key open doors with no knock or notice.” Legally, inspections must have a legitimate reason, and cannot be pretextual, or intended to find legitimate reasons through the search. Eight letters describe unsanitary living conditions, noting that “some days the water runs orange,” “water and sewage back[ing] up into the sink,” and there are “infestations of rodents... bedbugs, and roaches.” They write that a common room that is a key source of cooling for people who often can’t afford AC units or have broken units and “who if they don’t have access to an air-conditioned room… suffer,” is still closed after over a year due to COVID-19. Tenants explain that CM practices blatant racial, sexual, and mental-health-based discrimination when it comes to enforcing rules and regulations, targeting tenants who are either in particularly vulnerable positions or ones that stand up to their abuse more often. One tenant says “I see people who are too afraid to complain about the condition of their apartment… [who] feel their status as residen[t]... could be in jeopardy, or in fear of some sort of retaliation.”

Even employees working for Canning Management have expressed concern about how tenants are treated. A gardener who worked for FPM wrote an email corroborating many tenants’ claims, claiming “harassment… and vicious examples of cruelty… against a disabled woman… [and] against two extremely old ladies.” The letter described management conducting excessive re-inspections of rooms whose residents have immense anxiety, and sending letters of non-compliance, often threatening evictions, for “insulting a worker,” cases which the gardener describes as“ just plain wrong and absurd.” Many of the tenants most vocal about the harassment are elderly women—one letter was written by a man who said he “get[s] along well with management,” but that he sees “retaliation” from the management after complaints, and says that women are “treated as children... with no ownership of the program.” Another letter writes of a pattern of gendered harassment, saying that “management does not bully or harass men in any way that I can see,” although they also note that the men may simply not want to talk about it. +++ An especially prominent figure in most tenants’ stories of harassment and abuse is Karen Fagundes, a property manager who has been working with CM for over 20 years. Described by tenants as “hostile,” “irrational,” “a bully,” and “a pathological liar,” Fagundes is the face of CM and its abuse for many FPM residents. In one letter, a group of tenants wrote that “Karen [Fagundes] must go. No one trusts her. She is petty, cruel, and abusive. She is waging war against the tenants using her qualification as an Accredited Residential Manager as her defense.”

One tenant asserted that they absolutely needed a restraining order against her; another told us that their doctor had to reach out to Fagundes on multiple occasions because Fagundes was constantly harassing the tenant and exacerbat-

METRO

ing their acute anxiety.

Tenants recounted impromptu inspections during which management would try to find any flaw in the way they lived in their homes. One day, suddenly “everything had to be moved at least a foot from the baseboard heater,” including shoeboxes that had been there for 7+ years.

A tenant noted “management present... having normally dirty floors as a moral lapse, or even a sin,” and that during an inspection a supervisor said that because of houseplants on a windowsill, “firefighters could prick themselves, and couldn’t get inside [the room].” One tenant described management targeting tenants who wrote letters of complaint or went to community meetings, using these over-blown inspections and regulations to police tenant action and organizing. This tenant received letters of non-compliance and threats of eviction, directly connecting this “vindictive and unprofessional behavior” to her complaints about living conditions and harassment. One tenant told a story about how Fagundes reacted to a plumbing problem in their apartment. Because of an accumulation of hair in the drain of the tenant’s bathtub, they were experiencing some plumbing issues and, as per building policy, contacted management to get someone from maintenance to address the problem. Karen then proceeded to berate the tenant for the ‘damage’ and went so far as to claim that the tenant needed to cut their hair to keep this from happening again Fagundes’ behavior is certainly not unique, though. Many of those same complaints were leveled against Gloria Isacco, the Resident Services Coordinator, and Anne Reynolds, another property manager with CM. Both have been described as “hostile,” “incompetent,” and blatantly “apathetic” towards the residents they claim to provide services for. When speaking of their relationship with management officials, one tenant said, “It’s almost like a war of attrition; they keep pushing in hopes that you’ll get tired, die, or move.” +++ Housing abuses do not start and end with individuals, however, and they cannot be solved by removing hostile officials. Cruel property managers and coordinators are the symptom of a housing system that relies on evictions, poverty, power abuse, and intentional disrepair. Figures such as Isacco and Fagundes serve as the foot soldiers of Canning Management’s abuse, but the problem tenants are facing is much larger than Fox Point Manor itself. The US public housing system often acts as yet another avenue through which the state can police, surveil, and dehumanize populations they deem ‘undesirable.’ 45 percent of public housing residents are Black, and the vast majority are low income.

Subsidized housing is a key tool in fighting housing insecurity, but without proper oversight

and more power in tenants’ hands, the inherent power imbalance of residents who often have little housing choice creates conditions for abuse.

As many of the tenants told us, it seems that one’s dependence on subsidized housing automatically strips them of their right to privacy and self-autonomy. In response to a demand

by Isacco to remove the plants from their windowsill, one tenant wrote, “The Fox Point Manor management is trying to stamp out any sign of personality and individuality in the apartments. Plants on the window sill are normal. Is anyone going to tell the people living in the East Side or in Fox Point [that are not in subsidized housing] that they cannot have plants on their window sills because that will interfere with firefighters’ access[?] Of course not.” The same tenant goes on to write, “I believe that management at [FPM] is and has been violating our… civil rights and liberties… Management’s been aiming for over-control, and increasingly more and more power, which is not rightfully theirs to have.” These instances, and many more relayed to us by tenants, emphasize how dehumanizing public housing policies—whether real or imagined in this case—can be, as they deny people who rely on housing assistance certain rights, comforts, and avenues of self expression that are afforded to those who don’t need to rely on subsidized housing.

The public housing system has regulations in place that serve private management companies like CM and are invariably used against the tenants they claim to protect. Even the building’s maintenance workers, vendors, service coordinators, and mediators answer to CM, which corrupts their ability to serve the tenants’ needs. In response to an email sent by CM celebrating the building’s score of 90/100 from a 2012 HUD Inspection, one tenant wrote, “Of course you got a 90 -- Can you prove you were not in collusion with the “independent” investigator who ignored tenants who wished to speak with him and instead spent 45 mins talking with Karen in front of the building??” +++ One of the main complaints that tenants level against their current housing conditions is the fact that there is very little transparency in the way of tenant rights. For example, a client was met with hostility when trying to get their freezer fixed and was unsure what their rights were. What are their rights in that situation?

And how can they effectively go about making sure that right is upheld? The tenants assert that not only should these answers be provided to residents, but they should be easily accessible to all of them at a moment’s notice—keeping in mind the tenants’ range of neurodiversity and disability. FPM landlords like Gloria and Karen tend to capitalize on the lack of legal transpar-

ency and information accessibility, bulldozing the tenants with aggressive claims of ‘HUD violations’ knowing that they are afforded neither the time nor the resources to counter any of these claims.

One tenant said they simply want the truth about CM to be heard, loud and clear. While CM fashions itself as a harbinger of good fortune and community wellbeing, one tenant said that “they need to stop advertising it [FPM] as decent living.” Similarly, another tenant emphasized the importance of shedding light on CM’s abuse and maltreatment of FPM tenants. They said, “There needs to be pressure placed on the individuals who deliberately hurt others because they can. The members of this particular company are very susceptible to shaming... They want to be viewed as perfect.” The tenant maintained that increased public oversight of CM’s practices is a step towards keeping them in check.

FPM tenants have been organizing together for change for years. This resistance reflects a contestation of abusive landlord-tenant relationships and a more equitable vision of democratic subsidized housing. Tenants want and need a say in the management of FPM—as one tenant said, “What I personally would like to see is more teeth given to RI tenants advocacy group, the creation of a mediation step before any eviction goes to court… because this type of behavior needs to be checked.” Letters call for “proper and reliable management,” and say tenants are “treated like peasants,” attacking a lack of “[tenant] ownership.” One writer believes management is “aiming for over-control, and increasingly more and more power, which is not rightfully theirs to have,” laying out a vision for a more free FPM where tenants can share in power and avoid harassment. In the July tenant meeting, community members spoke of “wanting more freedom,” and “an end to the harassment [by management].” The Indy spoke to a tenant who suggested “open communication… [and] monthly meetings” where tenants could voice concerns and management could lay out clear expectations before immediately jumping to threatening evictions and letters of non-compliance. The long list of HUD requirements and inspection rules is meant to protect a living standard for tenants, but at FPM tenants describe management engaging in dehumanizing policing and surveillance—as one tenant said, “I feel like I’m living in a police state.” Another wrote, “The building feels more like a prison than an apartment home.”

It’s often assumed that US public housing will be subpar, and sometimes even justifiably so—that people shouldn’t be able to live in nice places without paying ‘their fair share.’

However, good housing is a human right, and something our government should provide for us without infringing on rights and humanity.

Over and over tenants emphasized simple yet profound demands: clean, healthy living conditions, an end to vindictive harassment, open lines of communication, and a say in the way Fox Point Manor is run. After writing to Senator Whitehouse, city council members, and local housing officials for years, they are still facing abuse, and they are still organizing for change.

Central to the power Canning Management holds over tenants is the precarity of tenants’ living conditions—as one letter detailed, “most [tenants] live under the federal poverty level. We cannot move.” Without a broad range of affordable options, the disproportionately low-income, disabled, and elderly residents are far more vulnerable to threats of eviction. In the face of this power imbalance, tenants are still meeting and organizing, envisioning a different model of public housing, with options, agency, and care. As a letter signed “the residents of Fox Point Manor” proclaims, “last time we checked, one did not give up their rights when moving into Section 8 housing.”

HANNA ABOUEID B’24 & KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 believe in comfortable housing for all.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 4

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EPHEMERA LUCY LEBOWITZ “KIDS” 17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BULLETIN

BULLETIN Upcoming Actions and Community Events Oct. 11 @12 PM—Indigenous Peoples Day Rhode Island Protest (by Native Green) Join Native Green and Narragansett tribal members to rally and commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day and to demand the removal of the recently-erected 14-foot statue of colonizer Rev. William Blackstone. Speakers will present from 1 to 3 PM on the history of the land and space and call for the removal of the statue and a reckoning with Blackstone’s history.

Location: Corner of Roosevelt & Exchange (Pawtucket Veterans Memorial) in Pawtucket, RI Oct. 6 @7 PM—October Community Meeting: Who Should Own Rhode Island’s Utility Company? (by Climate Action RI) Climate Action RI will be hosting an online discussion about the proposed sale of National Grid to PPL Corporation and how this may affect Rhode Island residents and state climate goals. Join guest speakers Fred Unger, a RI Solar developer and conservation expert, and Ken Payne of the Civic Alliance for a Cooler RI. Register online here: https://bit.ly/3oELxwk

answer key to the crossword on page 5

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

GoFundMe for tents for people experiencing homelessness (by Andrea Smith) tinyurl.com/tentsri All donations go towards buying tents for people currently living in inhospitable places, to be distributed by service providers and street outreach teams. There are currently over 1,000 people on waiting lists for individual and family shelter, while the state has only 608 year-round shelter beds, all of which are currently full.

Community Cares: Sponsor a Family for the Holidays (by DARE) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKdWKQaT0KNpc1qF1SLwwF-B9O3dzJD9PQscqUxepdWuoBUw/viewform Fill out Google Form to sponsor a family for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas.

COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new and used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

PVD Student Union’s Well-Being Fund (by Providence Student Union) Venmo or Cash App @pvdstudentunion Through this fund, Providence public high school students are able to apply for financial support to buy anything from school supplies to laptops.

Providence Community Fridge Location: 640 Broad Street Take what you need, leave what you can. Bring food and other household needs to keep the community fridge and shelves stocked! Or, donate to PVD Community Fridge’s GoFundMe, linked below, to help offset costs of acquiring a fridge and keeping it stocked. Stop by if you’re in need of groceries or household items! https://gofund.me/7ef40d4a

Ongoing Strikes Happening Now This week we’re following two major strikes

by BCTGM (Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union) and IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) against Kellogg and streaming services, respectively. Roughly three weeks ago, workers represented by BCTGM at Nabisco concluded a successful month-long strike for better labor contracts that, by its conclusion, affected every bakery and distribution facility in the country; and just this week negotiations between the UAW (United Auto Workers of America) and John Deere reached a tentative agreement after 99 percent of union workers voted to approve a strike. Strikes work. Stand in solidarity with workers fighting for better futures—don’t cross the picket line!

Kellogg About 1,400 unionized employees at Kellogg’s cereal plants in Battle Creek, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Memphis, Tennessee went on strike on Tuesday (10/5) after a year’s worth of negotiations with management for fairer contracts broke down. According BCTGM president Anthony Shelton, the grain company demanded that workers cede quality care, retirement benefits, and holiday/vacation pay. *Try not to buy Kellogg's, Keebler, Pop-Tarts, Eggo, Cheez-It, Club, Nutri-Grain, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops, Special K, All-Bran, Bear Naked Granola, Mini-Wheats, Morningstar Farms, Gardenburger, Austin, Carr’s, Famous Amos, Pringles, Ready Crust and Kashi.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 4

ILLUSTRATION SEDONA COHEN

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees This week, 90 percent of workers represented

by IATSE participated in a strike authorization vote, in which 98 percent of voters were in favor of striking. The union represents over 150,000 crew members in the US and Canada, and are demanding better pay for streaming-service work, higher wages for coordinators and assistants, longer rest periods between shifts and on weekends, and mandatory meal breaks during marathon shoots. The Union has been negotiating for months with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), which represents streaming giants like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon, and has been unsuccessful so far in reaching a fair deal. This strike includes everyone that works on film sets except for directors, writers, and actors, and it is the first time IATSE has struck all of its West Coast locations at once.

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

Accounts to follow to keep up with community actions & efforts (Instagram/Twitter) DARE: (@dare.pvd / @darepvd) AMOR: @amornetwork (both) Tenant Network: @tenantnetworkri (both) Grasping at the Root: @wegrasptheroot (both) Railroad: (@railroadpvd / @pvdrailroad) Abolish PVD: @abolishpvd (twitter only) STOP: @closehighside (instagram only) Black and Pink: @blackandpinkpvd (both) Harm Reduxx: @harm_reduxx_pvd (instagram only) QTMA: @qtma.pvd (instagram) COYOTE RI: (@coyote.ri / @coyoteri)

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers

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SEDONA COHEN “GREEN ECOSYSTEM”