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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018
VOLUME CLII, ISSUE 76
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Radical Monarchs talk sisterhood, social justice UCS supports Oakland-based advocacy group aims to inspire survivors young women, encourage participation in activism of sexual violence By TRISHA THACKER SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Radical Monarchs co-founders Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest kicked off a revelatory and reflective evening Wednesday night by asking audience members to imagine themselves as eleven year olds again. Martinez and Hollinquest co-founded Radical Monarchs, an Oakland-based young girls’ social justice group, to “create opportunities for young girls of color to form fierce sisterhood, celebrate their identities and contribute radically to their communities,” according to the organization’s website. Radical Monarchs was launched in December, 2014 after Martinez’s daughter voiced a desire to join a conventional girl’s scouting troop. “I started to think about what it would look like to create a troop that really centered (my daughter) as a young girl of color, where she could be with other sisters of color and where they could earn badges through contributions to justice and social work.” Martinez was also inspired to bring youth into social justice movements. “Movement work seems to be very
Workshop takes place of weekly meeting, discusses how to engage in mindful conversation By MELANIE PINCUS SENIOR STAFF WRITER REBECCA HO / HERALD
Anayvette Martinez (left) and Marilyn Hollinquest (right), co-founders of Radical Monarchs, launched the young girls’ social justice group in 2014 “to create opportunities for young girls of color,” according to its website. adult-centric. Young people aren’t really given access to social justice and histories and her-stories until much later until, maybe high school if you’re lucky,” she said. Radical Monarchs seek to teach young women to critique themes ranging from racial injustice and gender norms to beauty standards. For the unit on “Radical Love,” the team had “a grounding session” where they spoke about the importance of loving themselves and their bodies while also respecting their boundaries, Martinez said. The program aims to equip girls with techniques for conflict resolution to encourage
them to form healthy relationships. Girls are awarded badges such as the Black Lives Matter Badge and the Radical Pride Badge as they participate in the program. Hollinquest emphasized the importance of experiential learning for the girls. The program has “activists come in and talk about the wins that they are having, whether it is policy change, community impact, action and marches,” she said. For the unit on “Radical Advocacy,” the girls visited the California Statehouse to learn how to organize effectively and how bills become
laws. The girls also focused specifically on the issues of police brutality, deportation and affordable housing. “If you just march and you just lift up what’s wrong, that doesn’t create change. So it was really important for us that they get trained on this organizing cycle,” Hollinquest added. Martinez and Hollinquest were very honest about the challenges they faced in their work. They struggled with imposter syndrome and financial constraints as they worked on Radical Monarchs without pay » See MONARCH, page 4
The Undergraduate Council of Students held a workshop on how to have mindful conversations about sexual violence and support survivors in place of its usual Wednesday evening general body meeting. UCS Vice President Camila Pelsinger ’20, a lead peer educator in the Sexual Assault Peer Education program, cofacilitated the workshop in her capacity as a peer educator alongside SHARE Advocate Alana Sacks. “We replaced our general body meeting with a workshop because we saw a need in community members to have » See UCS, page 2
Grad student council Artist Shaun Leonardo investigates reviews grievance procedure identity in performance-based work General body also hears report on talks with Campus Life, updates on unionization vote By ERIC CHOI SENIOR STAFF WRITER
At its second general body meeting of the semester, the Graduate Student Council listened to a presentation on a new draft of the Graduate Student Grievance Procedure and the executive board’s report on its meeting with Vice President for Campus Life Eric Estes on graduate student housing, career resources and common room spaces. Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Thomas Lewis summarized the changes to the grievance procedure, which will establish a new timeline for each step of the process and clarify language in the current complaint system. Though the Graduate School is still in the process of refining the procedure, Lewis asked
graduate students to give feedback on the current draft. The current revisions include an option to file a complaint starting with an academic department’s director of graduate study, which could then progress to the department chair and finally to the Graduate School, according to the discussion. The draft also specifies how many working days each step of the procedure should take; for example, the time an ad hoc committee arrives at its decision on a complaint would be capped at 45 working days unless there are “exceptional circumstances.” GSC President Alastair Tulloch GS described some of the sections in the draft as a complete “overhaul” of the current procedure. After breaking into small groups to discuss the draft, graduate students offered substantive feedback. Some expressed worries that the draft did not do enough to help claimants deal with unwanted interaction with or retaliation » See GRADUATE, page 4
Multidisciplinary visiting artist engages students in interactive piece, reflects on past work By ELISE RYAN SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Multidisciplinary artist Shaun Leonardo and Christina Yang, director of public programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, drew a crowd of students and faculty to the Martinos Auditorium in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts last night for a conversation about Leonardo’s work and his recent performance at the museum. Heather Bhandari, adjunct professor of visual arts, introduced Leonardo “as an exceptional artist, a social activist and an extraordinary educator,” as well as “a powerful disrupter and change agent.” Leonardo is based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and
GUS REED / HERALD
Christina Yang (left) and Shaun Leonardo (right) discussed Leonardo’s work and recent performance at the Guggenheim Museum. has received support from Creative Capital and the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative. As a testament to his dedication to social practice, Leonardo co-founded Assembly, a program that invites youth aged 16 to 24 who have been arrested to join Leonardo in a storytelling and performance workshop as an alternative to having their cases pursued in court.
PIA MILEAF-PATEL / HERALD
Register to vote in R.I. The statewide election is on November 6. The deadline to register is October 7. For more information, visit vote.sos.ri.gov.
“Shaun and I are excited to present a view of what it takes to sustain a social practice within the life of an artist and also within the confines of a museum,” Yang said. “These are particularly divisive times in the United States, and Shaun is a unique artist working across many worlds, encompassing the visual » See LEONARDO, back
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Transforming Research conference discusses ‘science of science’ Researchers, funding organizations, experts, librarians, publishers talk research process By CATE RYAN SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Wednesday morning, the Transforming Research Conference welcomed a unique group of professionals to South Street Landing for a series of lectures and discussions. The gathering brings together not only researchers but also research funders, metrics experts, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders in the research community. The conference gives them a space to learn and discuss what Professor of Neuroscience Christopher Moore calls the “science of science.” Moore is interested in the potential for research processes to be evaluated in a more scientific way. The “macro-level understanding of the (research) enterprise is amazingly non-scientific,” Moore said, and suggested that the best way to measure success in research has yet to be determined. “If we could understand what success was, then maybe we could figure out which environments were best to create it,” he said. “Maybe we could create those environments at Brown.” Currently, research is evaluated in a number of ways — how many times a certain paper is cited, how many shares on social media it gets or the number of patents that come out of it, said Mike Taylor, an organizer of the conference and head of metrics development at technology research investment company Digital Science. Developing metrics for scientific discovery allows the scientific community to standardize all of these different forms of data so that they can be compared. Applying metrics to discovery attempts to “measure the immeasurable,” Moore said. While no ideal evaluation system exists, the conference aims to get the community closer to an answer, he added. Transforming Research held its inaugural meeting last year at Johns Hopkins University. Moore got excited about the conference when his colleague John Armstrong, the CEO of DiscoveryEngine, attended the event last year. Moore’s enthusiasm helped bring the conference to the University this year, Taylor said.
“Although data and evidence are becoming increasingly important, we don’t often have conversations about what all of these numbers mean,” Taylor said. As a result, Transforming Research aimed to create a space for those conversations to occur. He elaborated that, based on last year’s meeting, the most important component of the conference was the generous amount of time left between scheduled lectures that gives attendees and speakers the chance to talk to each other and interact with those outside of their subfield. The University offers an environment conducive to the themes of the conference, Moore said. “It’s a wonderful campus full of lots of different kinds of scholars,” Moore said, and added that the University has many proponents of “fairness and openness in academia.” Cornelia Dean, visiting professor of the practice of science, technology and society and former science editor at the New York Times, spoke at the event on Wednesday morning. Her talk centered on the public’s understanding of science, and the various barriers that can prevent the complete comprehension of research for those who aren’t involved in it. She has written two books — her first, “Am I Making Myself Clear?,” focuses on how researchers can present their work to a common audience, while her second title, “Making Sense of Science,” acts a guide for the public to understand scientific research. Before she spoke at the event, Dean said her remarks would highlight the notion that “the research community needs to engage more frequently, and better, with the public.” Increasing public interaction with science is crucial in a world that more frequently faces controversial breakthroughs, Dean said, and drew on examples such as CRISPR genetic modification, artificial intelligence on the battlefield and geoengineering. Decisions on these issues cannot be made without “ordinary citizens who are able to carry on conversations … in a way that’s based on fact and not on manipulation,” she said. Transforming Research continues today with a program that features a talk by Neil Sarkar, the director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, a session on research policy and strategy led by Taylor and Armstrong and presentations on citizen science, metrics and other topics.
COURTESY OF BROWN UNIVERSITY
The University hosted Transforming Research’s first meeting Wednesday morning at South Street Landing. The conference welcomed various research stakeholders to campus, providing them a space to exchange ideas.
» UCS, from page 1 a workshop on this kind of information given recent events in national discourse and in the political sphere,” Pelsinger said. The workshop featured tips for supporting survivors, which included cautioning against saying “I believe you” when someone divulges information about their experience with sexual violence. Instead, it is more appropriate to “thank them for sharing that with you,” Pelsinger said. “If I were to come up to you and say, ‘someone just hit me with their car,’ you would never think to say ‘I believe you,’ and the same should be true of sexual violence,” she added, “Unfortunately, we all know that that’s not true.” Ahead of tonight’s workshop, UCS President Shanzé Tahir ’19 sent an email to the undergraduate student body, co-signed by Pelsinger, to ac-
knowledge “that this week has been difficult and painful, particularly for those who are survivors of sexual violence. … We want to publicly affirm the stories and accounts of survivors, and the urgency to not only believe them, but to support them,” they wrote. “Offering people help, but never forcing help” is also deeply important, Pelsinger said during the workshop. “In instances of violence and harm of this nature, someone’s agency is taken from them, and so when we’re providing resources and we’re providing support, we want to make sure that we reaffirm that individual’s agency and make sure not to accidentally try to pressure them into doing something.” Sacks and Pelsinger also asked those in attendance to consider society’s idea of an “ideal” or “believable” victim of sexual violence, along with characteristics that fall outside of this
category by writing words down on Post-It Notes. Those present suggested “white,” “wealthy,” “well-educated” and “sober” as some terms that fit in society’s “good victim” category, and “revealing clothing,” “undocumented,” and “(person of color)” as terms that are typically excluded. Sacks emphasized the importance of thinking about how we talk about victims’ accounts of their experiences. “If I’m someone who’s saying ‘oh, but she was such a credible witness,’ or … ‘they presented so well,’ … there is a way that it can be unintentionally invalidating to so many people, most people” whose experiences fall outside of society’s perception of a credible victim, Sacks said. Sacks and Pelsinger also answered questions submitted anonymously by those in attendance.
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018 • PAGE 3
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Lupe Fiasco drops album steeped in social commentary 24 tracks grapple with history of slavery, themes of gang violence, drugs, community empowerment By KION YOU STAFF WRITER
Very rarely does an artist release a 20-plus-song album that is highly enjoyable front to back — no filler and no frills. Chicago-based rapper Lupe Fiasco’s seventh studio album, “Drogas Wave,” a 98-minute, 24-track firebrand that dropped Sept. 21, provides an expansive and rich utopian re-imagining of human suffering, both domestically and abroad. Following its lackluster precursor, “Drogas Light,” “Drogas Wave” is filled with the dense lyricism, vivid portraiture, nuanced social commentary and “extracurricular listening” that has defined Lupe’s critical success. It has been 13 years since Lupe skyrocketed into the hip hop limelight conferred to him by his feature on Kanye West’s “Touch The Sky.” After his initial ascent, he quickly dropped two veritable classics —2006’s “Food & Liquor” and 2007’s “The Cool” — but has since failed to replicate his rare achievement of both mainstream and critical success. Though his 2015 album, “Tetsuo and Youth,” proved to be an indelible assortment of abstract wordplay, the three other albums he has put out are contrived. This may be due in part to Lupe’s constant conflict with his label, Atlantic Records, which has continuously blocked Lupe from releasing the music he has wanted to release: “I will never ever ever … give this label my heart,” Lupe said at
a concert. Now that his contractual obligations have been seen through, “Drogas Wave” marks a moment that exhibits Lupe at his independent, unhindered best. Conceptually, the album initially revolves around an image of sick and dying enslaved people who were thrown overboard while being shipped from Africa to the West Indies. Lupe reimagines the enslaved as “long chains,” or underwater-dwelling humans who spend their lives sinking slave ships. This tale then transitions into other themes like gang violence, drugs, self-help and community empowerment, which eventually coalesce into Lupe’s hope for a future unconstrained by nauseating realities. Lupe’s now-signature use of acronyms and obscure references submerge these ideas and their connecting strands in a certain opacity to create a slowly digestible work that requires multiple listens. The album’s first few tracks highlight Lupe’s thematic and linguistic creativity and set up a cinematic montage that eventually propels listeners into the present. In “Manilla,” the album’s furious anthem, Lupe raises up the Manilla, a West African currency used in the slave trade, as a dehumanizing symbol of enslaved people. “Don’t ruin us, don’t ruin us, don’t ruin us, God said,” Lupe sings, using the D.R.U.G.S. acronym to trace a continuous line of commodification that extends from historical enslavement to contemporary mass incarceration. In “WAV Files,” as the title suggests, Lupe raps smoothly on a laid back beat and riffs off entendre after entendre on topics like Davy Jones, Poseidon and Jay Z’s » See ALBUM, page 4
COURTESY OF SCOTT SANDARS
Lupe Fiasco’s new album “Drogas Wave” marks the artist’s break with Atlantic Records and emergence as an independent creative artist. Lupe rose to fame 13 years ago after a feature in Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky.”
‘Foreign Flicks’ series screens romance drama ‘In the Mood for Love’ Critically acclaimed 2000 film regales past love stories, depicts 1960s Hong Kong love affair By ANNABELLE WOODWARD SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Last week, the Center for Language Studies’ “Foreign Flicks” series screened “In the Mood for Love,” an atypical Chinese drama-romance whose brazen, erotic commitment to traditionalism prompts audiences to reconsider the role fidelity plays in modern love. Written and directed by renowned Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, the film captures the thwarted love of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), two young professionals who move with their respective spouses into the same apartment building in Hong Kong. Both quiet, introspective and impeccably dressed, their relationship intensifies from one of casual friendship to codependency after they discover that their spouses — both thought to have been on “business trips” — are having an affair abroad. They ultimately fall for each other but refuse to act on their feelings on principle, not wanting to be like their unfaithful spouses. The film was universally adored by critics upon its release in 2000, with Elvis Mitchell of the New York
Times going so far as to dub it “the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year.” It was most lauded for its bold stylistic composition — the ornate visuals and rhythmic slowmotion sequences that succeed in making the lovers’ repressed desire intensely palpable. There remains a certain ceremony to the film that is often lost on modern love stories, as instanced by the scene in which the elegant Su walks out in an elaborate cocktail dress, her swaying hips scored by a string orchestra. Similarly evocative are the scenes that emphasize the gravity of the neighbors’ in-passing encounters — exchanging pleasantries on the stairwell is scored as though it is a dance. Another tactful choice employed by Wong is to never fully display the couples together on-screen — each character only hears their correspondent partner on the other end of the phone or from behind a door saying things like “I’ll be home late tonight.” Not exclusive to the couples, the dialogue between each of them is consistently sparse and cryptic: “Bring two handbags for my boss,” says Su to her husband before he departs for Japan. “Why?” “You know why.” Wong uses these brief exchanges to reinforce the stoicism of the neighbors’ unorthodox relationship and contrast it starkly against the
COURTESY OF KAREN SETO
Award-winning filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” is an atypical Chinese drama-romance. The films stars Tony Leung as Chow Mo-wan and Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen, who portray forbidden lovers. ostensibly “principled” world they live in. Wong artfully demonstrates hierarchical principles that govern social interaction through scenes that depict neighbors and co-workers practicing rehearsed-sounding politeness and humility. But it is also a world steeped in tacit understandings, which is established early on, when Chow repeats, “I’m not like you,” to his brothelfrequenting best friend.
The tension between the two worlds leaves the filmic lovers, friends and ambiguously related individuals suspended in a fascinatingly erotic, ambiguous limbo. Are they touching behind closed doors? You can’t be certain. The ball drops when their spouses return. Chow moves to Shanghai, Su has a child, and their lives go on as planned. Neither Chow nor Su divorce their spouses, but they continue to
pine for each other in silence. The movie ends with a powerful scene of longing: Chow whispering about his love for Su into a hole in the wall of an ancient ruin. Presumably years after Chow is long gone, the camera pans through the ruin, eventually settling on the hole, which has vines growing from it. Not all is lost, the vines communicate, and the screen goes dark.
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
» GRADUATE, from page 1
» MONARCH, from page 1
from the person named in the complaint. Lewis responded that the Graduate School would add language in the draft to protect the claimant. One graduate student added that phrases like “exceptional circumstances” in the draft seemed “too loosey-goosey,” adding that the claimant might disagree with the department on what would qualify as such. Lewis answered this worry by pointing out that the matter would go up to the Graduate School in light of any disagreement. At the end of the comment session, Tulloch added that people could give more feedback on the revisions via an anonymous form. The GSC Executive Board also reported on its meeting with Estes. Tulloch explained that housing has become an “increasing problem” for graduate students as the undergraduate and graduate population increases, and the board discussed possible solutions with Estes. Referring to an article by The Herald on graduate student housing, Tulloch explained that the Graduate School had reached out to the GSC to talk about graduate students’ housing rights after the article was published. Chair of Student Life Jack Krantz GS also said that the board had
for three years while juggling full-time jobs. But recently, “we landed this amazing grant that helped us step away from our full-time jobs,” Martinez said, which allowed them to map their future vision for the organization.
» ALBUM, from page 3 Tidal, while simultaneously painting a picture of “walkin’ on water ‘til my feet like Jesus Christ.” Lupe does not limit himself to rapping in American English but also speaks in Spanish in “Drogas” and assumes a faux-Patois in “Gold vs the Right Things to Do.” Interludes are common in long albums, but only Lupe could include something like the “Slave Ship - Interlude,” a three-and-half minute violin solo which comes in after the fourth track. Rosy Timms, the soloist, intersperses slow melancholic melodies with dissonant thrashes between low and high octaves and creates a spiritually overflowing elegy that elevates the album to a lyrical-transcendet plane. The piece recalls Krzysztof
“emphasized” to Estes the need for centers like CareerLAB to be “more accommodating” to graduate students. Krantz added that the board conveyed the need for more graduate student spaces — the
only such space is the graduate student lounge where GSC meetings are held. Vice President of Advocacy D’Ondre Swails GS also gave an update on the board’s meeting with President Christina
Paxson P’19 and Provost Richard Locke P’18. A new report system for filing possible violations of the pre-election agreement on graduate student unionization is now available, Swails said.
“Our mission this year has been to fundraise and hire our first staff and quickly move to expand nationally. We will be launching four troops in the Bay Area this spring. The vision is definitely to be wherever we are needed and wanted,” she said. Je-Shawna Wholley, assistant director of the LGBTQ Center, said Radical Monarchs’ work is critical “because it is about centering marginalized communities, it’s about empowering youth to feel engaged, to speak up for themselves.” “I hope that (the audience) will walk away with the understanding that it’s possible to create the world that you want to see if you notice there are gaps, that’s literally what these two folks just did,” Wholley added. The event was organized by the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender’s Womxn’s History Series, LGBTQ Center’s Legacy Series and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown Center for Students of Color’s Multiracial Heritage Series, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the Swearer Center for Public Service.
Penderecki’s 1960 “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” a work composed for a 52-piece string ensemble that attempts to shape ineffable suffering into sheet music, and only further highlights Lupe’s expansive imagining of how close music can come to doing history justice. Taken with the idea of drawing as close as possible to the core of human suffering and then reimagining it with hope and grace, Lupe drops the theme of sea dwellers to ruminate on contemporary and individual loss and despair: In “Jonylah Forever” and “Alan Forever” Lupe beautifully elegizes Jonylah Watkins, a six-month-old killed in Chicago gang violence, and Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned off the coast of Turkey. However, in Lupe’s utopian world,
Jonylah is “accepted by every medical school you applied” and afterwards returns to her neighborhood where she creates a “free clinic, nobody denied,” saving gang violence victims. Alan Kurdi becomes a world class swimmer, nicknamed “the lifeguard,” who eventually rescues a drowning boy from the sea. Both end up in similar positions, taking what literally killed them and using it as their source of strength: “Bet you ain’t even know you saved yourself,” Lupe says, leaving listeners a cryptic message that may point to the breaking of the cyclical chains of violence. With 24 tracks in “Drogas,” there are bound to be some disappointing cuts, and there are, like the song “Down,” where Lupe veers into (hilariously) corny aquatic rap, saying “fish
is my friends and the whales is my homies / octopuses my people, the shrimp, they all know me.” The song “XO” sticks out as pop-rap-EDM residue reminiscent of “Lasers”: “You and me, ecstasy (X-X O),” Troi Irons sings in the chorus. However, these tracks are by no means objectively bad and fail to disrupt overall flow of the album, which is disproportionately filled with catchy and nuanced melodies, classic instrumentals and a lyrical effort only matched by a handful of contemporary artists. Even in just the album title, “Drogas,” or drugs in Spanish, several meanings can be ascertained. It may point listeners to the flooding of drugs onto the streets. The “wave” may refer to a washing over, both in a life-giving and life-destroying force. Or, simply, it may refer to being “dope” and “wavy.”
In “Manilla,” Lupe raps, “you can do anything if you survive blackness” and possibly distills the spirit of the album to a single line. It is out of this conviction that Lupe and his art operates: his belief that, though racial oppression is a battle far from won, glimmers of hope can be thawed out from history’s dark abysses. It is also out of this conviction that Lupe gives listeners all of himself in his music — Japanese video games, circuit laws and ancient Greek poetry somehow tie into Lupe’s self-aware, braggadocio claims (“fit the life of a whole booth in only half a line”). At this point in Lupe’s career, it is abundantly clear that he will never back down from the esoteric references, difficult-to-parse connections and straight bars that makes his music so frustrating, yet so great.
JASMINE RUIZ / HERALD
The second general body meeting of the Graduate Student Council this year discussed changes to grievance procedures and reported on the board’s various meetings with University administrators.
TODAY
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018 • PAGE 5
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
menu
misty midnight
SATELLITE DINING ANDREWS COMMONS
Pizza: Barbecue Bam Bam, Chicken Parmesan, Pepperoni, Make Your Own Pasta, Macaroni and Cheese Bar JOSIAH’S
BLUE ROOM
Taco Thursday, Quesadilla Station, Mushroom Swiss Burger
Chicken Tikka Masala, Madras Vegetable Curry, Turkey Chili
DINING HALLS SHARPE REFECTORY LUNCH
DINNER
Chicken Fingers, Mashed Sweet Potatoes, Italian Meatballs, Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies
Green Curry Fish of the Day, Yellow Rice Turmeric, Baked Basil Chicken Pasta
VERNEY-WOOLLEY LUNCH
DINNER
Shaved Steak Sandwich, Roasted Vegetable Muffaletta Sandwich, Curly Seasoned French Fries
Roast Turkey with Gravy, Lentil with Yams and Kale, Homemade Bread Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes
sudoku
ANDREW DING XIAOLIN / HERALD
The Providence River flows misty and mysterious on a cool fall night as students on College Hill brave the gloomy weather and look forward to clearer skies this long weekend.
Q U O T E O F T H E D AY
“We have a lot of institutional privilege here at Brown and a lot of resources, and I think we should be using crossword
those to sort of advocate for the folks in Providence.
”
— Rose Lang-Maso ’20
See summer on page 4.
CORRECTION The Oct. 3 article “Employer donations favor democrats” stated that 61 Brown employees contributed to Raimondo between January and November in 2014. In fact, 61 Brown employees contributed to Raimondo in the year 2014. The Herald regrets the error.
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Understanding the Imposter Phenomenon 10:00 A.M. J. Walter Wilson, 512
Back at Brown with OIP and CareerLAB 12:00 P.M. J. Walter Wilson, 440
Chinese Tea Time 4:00 P.M. Gerard House, 101
Senior Night at Flatbread 8:00 P.M. 161 Cushing Street
TOMORROW Brown Legal History Workshop 9:00 A.M. Faculty Club, Third Floor
Grad Student Mock Interview Day 9:00A.M. CareerLAB, Third Floor
Food on the Move: Fruit and Vegetable Market 12:00 P.M. 121 South Main Street, 241
Brown University Field Hockey v. Harvard 4:00 P.M. Goldberger Family Field
COMMENTARY PAGE 6 • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
COMMENTARY THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018 • PAGE 7
Critiquing attitudes toward abortion in the U.S. and beyond MARYSOL FERNANDEZ staff columnist
Women’s reproductive rights are once more at the center of the political discourse in the United States. As the Senate moves to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a decision that will affect nationwide legislation for decades to come, people around the country are yet again compelled to come out to defend a woman’s basic right to agency over her body. Setting aside the allegations of sexual assault that are by themselves enough to condemn the confirmation as completely unacceptable, Kavanaugh’s political opinions will threaten many of the victories made in the last decades to ensure the rights of traditionally marginalized groups. The right to a safe and accessible abortion is at the forefront of the discussion. In light of these recent events, it has become evident that the United States is in serious danger of falling behind the rest of the world in the movement to protect a woman’s right to choose. I would like to focus this discussion on the comparison between the development of legislation in the United States and in Latin America, for I believe U.S. literature on women’s issues in Latin American societies highlights some of the fundamental conflicts the United States is facing. Latin America is a region that continues to have some of the most restrictive and oppressive reproductive laws in the world. Only two countries in the region, Uruguay and Cuba, have legalized abortion independent of justification. In some countries like
El Salvador, abortion continues to be highly criminalized. However, Latin America has recently experienced a push toward liberalizing abortion laws. There have been large social movements, like those in Argentina, and even actual legislative change, such as in Chile, where abortion became legal in certain circumstances in 2017. While it is undeniable that the United
tion Safer,” the author speaks to the process by which Uruguay first made abortions safe for all woman and later won the struggle to legalize the procedure in all cases. The author begins by noting that Uruguay is “one of the most democratic countries in Latin America,” a clarification any American writer has to make before praising any country in the Global South. For example,
around the fact that Cuba has historically had one of the most progressive reproductive legislations in the world. Instead, writers have focused on the high abortion rates in Cuba, noting that many Cuban women decide to abort their pregnancies because of economic instability or lack of support. No mention, of course, is made that these same situations exist in the Unit-
What becomes clear is that while it is undeniable that the United States continues to have more liberal abortion laws than most countries in Latin America, the latter is quite clearly moving forward, while the first is experiencing a standstill, if not a step backwards.
States continues to have more liberal abortion laws than most countries in Latin America, the latter is quite clearly moving forward, while the first is experiencing a standstill, if not a step backwards. Writers in the United States have written a lot about reproductive rights in Latin America. However, U.S. writers have addressed the issue in the same way they have traditionally written about the region — with problematic oversimplifications and a presumption of moral authority. In the New York Times opinion piece “From Uruguay, a Model for Making Abor-
this qualification would not have been made in an article about abortion rights in a Western European country, despite the fact that Uruguay ranks better than France in the very study on corruption perceptions that the author sites. Furthermore, this Uruguayan model is presented as an example only for other Latin American and African countries, suggesting the United States has resolved the issue and can learn nothing from the model. A more drastic example is found in examining the literature on Cuba, where American publications very rarely seem to frame the discourse
ed States as well, and that perhaps part of the reason abortion rates are lower here than they are in Cuba is that Americans, especially in more conservative states, do not have the same access to affordable abortions that Cuban women do. I would like to reiterate that I am not arguing that reproductive rights are, in general, better in Latin America than they are in the United States. The region continues to be highly restrictive, and even the most liberal countries face some of the same issues the United States faces as well as others more specific to their nation’s cir-
cumstance. However, I argue that these examples call into question the moral and critical standing that writers from the United States have on the issue. It strikes me as yet another instance in which the neocolonial perspective distorts the ways we perceive the complicated realities that exist in Latin America by translating these realities into our culturally specific framework and thereby oversimplifying them. Furthermore, this distortion serves to give us a false sense of security that we have resolved certain issues. The reality is that, while I am hopeful about the future of reproductive rights in Latin America, I am highly threatened by the recent decisions made in the United States and am wary of what is to come in the future. If the United States seeks to hold any of the moral and critical standing it claims — which, while highly problematic, is nonetheless widely accepted by most Americans — it needs to actively address its own recurring issues surrounding reproductive rights. The threat to these rights is one that we are experiencing in our very communities right now. This is not the case of some far away injustice affecting people we do not see every day. Critiquing Latin America and other regions while ignoring the deteriorating situation within our own borders is one the most dangerous things we could do.
Marysol Fernandez ’21 can be reached at marysol_fernandez@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
NEWS THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018
Students stay in Providence over summer through University programs Swearer Center initiatives expand local nonprofit partnerships to increase students’ engagement By HENRY DAWSON CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Swearer Center for Public Service is partnering with over 100 local nonprofits that are looking to attract student interns over the summer — increasing the number of partner organizations affiliated with the Swearer Center fivefold over the past couple of years, said Director of Student Development at the Swearer Center Betsy Shimberg. The Swearer Center also assists students hoping to intern in Providence over the summer through the iProv Summer Fellowship Program, a program in conjunction with Careers and Life After Brown that awards 20 undergraduate students $3,500 stipends to pursue full-time summer internships with nonprofit organizations based in the greater Providence area. “Swearer does a lot of work to generate these employer partnerships and then we sort of run an application process where students will apply to iProv,” said Director of CareerLAB Matthew Donato. “These are very popular internships.” In addition to programs run through the Swearer Center, students who choose to stay in Providence can fund their summer through the BrownConnect LINK Award Program, which grants selected students
»LEONARDO, from page 1 arts, masculinity, performance, black and brown identities, failure and the law,” she added. Leonardo began by giving an overview of “Primitive Games,” the piece he recently exhibited at the Guggenheim. The piece involved the coalescing of four distinct groups: members of the New York Police Department, military veterans, recreational users of firearms and citizens impacted by street violence. After four months of negotiations and workshops, the groups came together in the Guggenheim’s rotunda — which had been transformed into a gladiatorial arena — to debate through voiceless movement. The groups were not privy to the identities of the other groups at any point throughout the workshops and were not made aware of the central issue of debate until the performance. “They could not perceive who was on the other side of that argument until they were faced with that person,” Leonardo said. This avoided the creation of talking points, which often cause communication to fail before it has been initiated, he added. “The argument that I’m posing here is that what interrupts or completely defeats interconnectivity is the fact that
$3,500 for domestic internships. Last year, 20 percent of LINK award recipients chose to intern in Providence, Donato said. Computer science students intent on spending the summer in Providence can also turn to Bears@Work, a program that connects computer science students to R.I. tech companies through a variety of internship opportunities. Since the University has historically matched motivated students to local companies, demand for interns has burgeoned and companies work to entice “talent to stay in the state long term,” Donato said. For students, Donato attributed the popularity of interning in Providence to access to campus facilities and the affordability of the city, among other explanations. Students who stayed in Providence this summer enjoyed some of these perks, referencing positive experiences using their free access to Rhode Island Public Transit Authority to explore Newport Beach and Cranston, taking advantage of gym and library access and finding local spots like Coffee Exchange, AS220, Xaco Taco, White Electric and a wealth of farmers markets that appear during the summer months. Shell Yang ’19 developed software for Utilidata in downtown Providence through Bears@Work. Yang said she developed a stronger connection to Providence through her experience living near campus. Elana Hausknecht ’21 interned at Southside Community Land Trust
over the summer with funding from iProv. She said that spending time in Providence after her first year helped her realize that as a student at the University, she has a responsibility to the greater Providence community. Hausknecht now is a head of Winter Break Providence, which allows students to spend the winter in the city. Alexander Philips ’21, who received iProv funding to intern at the R.I. Department of State Elections, said his summer experience helped him figure out his career goals. “As my first job in the public sector, I gained valuable experience working with the public on important civic issues,” he wrote in a reflection piece for the Swearer Center. “The internship made me consider pursuing a career serving the public in a governmental position.” Director of the State Government Internship Program Bea Lanzi said she hopes to increase her on-campus presence, attracting students to work at the Statehouse. Rose Lang-Maso ’20, who worked on Aaron Regunberg’s ’12 lieutenant governor campaign through iProv, urged students to engage in life outside of College Hill. “We have a lot of institutional privilege here at Brown and a lot of resources, and I think we should be using those to sort of advocate for the folks in Providence in the ways they want to be advocated for, and the first step of that is to get off the Hill,” she said, adding that spending time at local establishments over the summer, in particular the coffee shop
language is the very thing that gets in the way,” Leonardo said. The performance removed the possibility for the groups to fall back on defensive language, he explained, forcing them to rely on the embedded choreography unique to each identity. To transport a slice of the exhibit, Leonardo asked the Granoff audience to stand and participate in an exercise used in “Primitive Games.” Posing questions such as “Do you think you will be alive in ten years?” and “Have you ever held a bullet?,” he asked each audience member to respond by rotating their body a quarter-turn in either direction. The audience shifted, with people ending up in opposition, isolated or facing one another, depending on each person’s private responses. At the Guggenheim performance, this exercise was used to break the individuals of the four groups into two sides — revealing connections across group identities. This was only a taste of the exercises that Leonardo introduced to students in a workshop held earlier Wednesday, which asked students to investigate whether debate could be played out through movement — like it had in “Primitive Games.” Leonardo focuses on embodiment — taking on roles, characters, emotions
— in many of his works. To do this, he has trained and become a “Mexican wrestler, a boxer, a mixed martial artist, a bullfighter,” he said. “So it was always important to me that in this embodiment … I was critiquing from the inside, out.” He began to involve other players in his performance pieces over time, moving away from a focus on the self, as he investigated masculinity, violence and community. One piece — “Bull in the Ring” — enacted a now-banned football drill of the same name, which required one player to enter a circle formed by his teammates and play the part of a matador, as another charged toward him like the bull. “I’m consistently — and particularly these days — trying to find approaches and strategies for moving individuals and communities closer together,” Leonardo said, speaking to his work as an artist and a social activist. As program director at the Guggenheim, Yang facilitated the realization of Leonardo’s work in the museum, “where it not only held the space, but … imbued the institution with risk-taking, vulnerability and strength in a way that transformed our conception of what kinds of conversations could happen within the often conventional walls of a museum,” Bhandari said.
PIA MILEAF-PATEL
White Electric, allowed her to build a relationship with people outside of the University’s community. Lang-Maso continued to work on Regunberg’s campaign into the academic year — an experience that highlighted the disconnect between her life at the University and the events happening in its surrounding areas, she said.
Last month, Lang-Maso left her office approximately an hour and a half before a shooting nearby outside of the Providence Career and Technical Academy. “That’s when I really had this strong moment of okay, Brown’s really separated from things … that was a really stark example of that for me. Things happen beyond here that matter.”