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AS STUDENTS FACE CLIMATE ANXIETY, TAKING ACTION WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY IS THE BEST APPROACH

by Marianne E. Krasny

Climate anxiety is real and contributing to the mental health crisis among young people. A recent US study found that 70% of 18-34 year-olds worry “a great deal” about global warming. Many young people also feel anxious, helpless and overwhelmed by the bad news about our climate.

These anxieties are permeating universities and overwhelming university mental health systems. According to Sarah Stoeckl of the University of Oregon’s Office of Sustainability, if young people feel “paralyzed in these uncomfortable emotions, then we’re not going to be able to solve this thing.”

Yet, in university classrooms, students often learn about the climate crisis in ways that exacerbate feelings of paralysis. Gloom and doom is often the main message students walk away with after a lecture on climate science, and discussions about what they can do about our shared crisis are few and far between.

So, what is a teacher to do? In my classes for Cornell students and my online courses for global audiences, I have tried two approaches to refocus anxiety: 1.) take action and 2.) join forces with a friend.

When students examine a list of solutions to draw down greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they often choose behaviors like eating less meat and reducing food waste—two highly impactful “lifestyle” actions. But what happens to students who choose actions they can’t take in their everyday lives—like restoring forests or reforming public transit? One approach is to raise money for an organization that addresses these issues. Another is to try to change policy. I have had students advocate for better access to public transportation in the City of Seattle and for more friendly walking and biking policies on the campus of the University of Lagos in Nigeria.

But my students don’t simply take action themselves. They join forces with a friend or family member.

We might aspire to be influencers and have thousands follow us as we reduce meat consumption or lobby for better climate policies. But this is simply unrealistic for most of us. We do, however, have friends, family members, classmates, and colleagues. These people constitute our close social networks—we communicate frequently, see each other often, and share common friends. If we invite them over for a plant-rich meal or point out ways we can reduce food waste at work, there’s a good chance they hear our message not just from us, but also from other friends, family members, or colleagues in our close social network. To convince people to change complex behaviors, like eating habits, they need to hear the behavior change message multiple times from multiple messengers.

The social connectedness suggests we all share some responsibility as part of systems of injustice.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist Damon Centola has even shown that if we try to influence people we are close to and those with whom we do not have strong ties at the same time, the intended behavior will spread more slowly than if we just stick with our close friends and family. The reason comes down to the types of messages people hear—within close networks we are likely to hear the same message from multiple people who share the same values. Once we add someone distant, they may feel free to push back on the behavior and influence others to abandon whatever climate actions they had set out to take. You might be on the verge of joining an organization fighting for climate mitigation after encouragement from your siblings, but then your distant uncle derides your efforts, and you pull back.

There’s a name for joining forces with close friends and family to take action—Network Climate Action. The idea is simple: take a climate action yourself and persuade your close social network to take the action alongside you. Students enjoy applying the research on influencing behaviors—strategies like choice architecture, communicating social norms, or avoiding becoming moral rebels and making people feel guilty about their behaviors (and thus resistant to change).

Students also grapple with notions of personal and societal responsibility. Iris Marion Young’s social connections approach suggests we all share some responsibility as part of systems of injustice. Robin Zheng’s notion of role-ideals states that we can all try to do a little better in living up to ideals about what it means to be a parent, friend, colleague, or volunteer. I suggest that we can incorporate actions to address climate change in our striving to reach each of our role ideals.

Who are some of the students who have influenced their close networks to take action? A Cornell student from China noted that his family was throwing out 50-60% of the food they purchased. After talking with them, he discovered that his mother was preparing dinner every night, but his father often ate dinner with business associates after work. Once his family was aware of the importance of keeping food waste out of the landfill (where it produces the potent greenhouse gas methane), his mother and father began communicating with each other about dinner plans each day, and his mother stopped preparing dinner when his father was not coming home for dinner. Their family food waste dropped to near zero.

Other students have raised money for Femme International, an NGO that helps girls stay in school by providing menstrual supplies. One student showed the film Period. End of Sentence, which documents how menstruation keeps poor girls out of school, and asked for donations after we watched the film. Another student got permission to make Femme International the target organization for her sorority’s fundraiser.

Plant-rich diet is perhaps the most popular Network Climate Action. An online student from Barcelona invited her friends over for “sustainable tapas” on a regular basis. While eating they discussed the value of plant-based meals. Students have fun trying out new meatless recipes with friends and family.

People often ask me why fight for the climate when we seem to be losing the struggle. My answer is twofold. One, if you asked civil rights activists in the 1950s what their chances were of changing human rights legislation in the US, their answers undoubtedly would have been grim. If you asked them whether their efforts gave meaning to their lives, they likely would have responded positively. I would rather fight the climate crisis than say I never tried, and along the way I may strengthen the connections that give meaning to my life. And by bringing students along with me I may be able to help them combat climate anxiety and the climate crisis.

Students have fun trying out new meatless recipes with friends and family.

THE EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION

On a sunny afternoon in mid-February 2018, I sat outside Urartu Coffee, a popular Armenian-owned café on Artsakh Avenue in Glendale’s pedestrian zone.1 As I waited for a meeting to begin, I overheard the conversation of ten or so Armenian young people at a nearby table. From the University of Southern California sweaters several wore, I presumed they were undergraduates, most likely between eighteen and twenty-t wo years of age. They spoke with youthful exuberance and volume, the sort that made not overhearing their conversation impossible. I pondered code-s witching as the discussion vacillated between Armenian and English without any consistency that I could discern. But then, at some point, one person announced to the others, “Guys, we should have a Vernissage here in Glendale! Can you imagine how many people would show up?” In all seriousness, another picked up this thread immediately: “Yeah, man! When I’m the mayor of Glendale, I’ll definitely make that happen!” Vernissage, a large, open-a ir market in Armenia’s capital city, Yerevan, offers an extensive collection of traditional Armenian art, books, carpets, jewelry, musical instruments, and many other crafts. It is a popu lar attraction among locals as well as tourists. These ambitious youth recognized the cultural and economic implications of bringing the market to their local suburban community. They seemed to articulate an entrepreneurial ambition, but not in the traditional way of operating commercial businesses. Rather, they wanted to empower and enrich their community as the f uture mayors of Glendale. I was struck that a group of young people would spend a Saturday afternoon brainstorming their f uture careers as local political entrepreneurs.

What I observed outside Urartu Coffee certainly could have several other interpretations. Perhaps the group’s enthusiastic pronouncements reflected a flight of fancy instead of a rooted commitment to local politics. But I observed this interaction at the end of my fieldwork in Glendale, where I had lived for over a year. What I heard resonated with me and corroborated many of my personal experiences in Glendale, where I had participated in rallies, volunteered in local campaigns, shadowed Armenian political candidates, attended political fundraisers, and brainstormed Glendale politics with local friends—sometimes at that very same café! Indeed, as the youth at the next table formulated their f uture aspirations, I was waiting for a friend—a nother Glendale Armenian, not much older than they were—who had recently decided against a career in filmmaking and founded, instead, a political consultancy firm for aspiring Armenian elected officials in Glendale and Greater Los Angeles. For me, t hese young people embodied what had come to represent the distinct energy, optimism, and ambition of Armenians when they discuss their city, Glendale.

Given Glendale’s recent history, the young people’s seeming civic aspirations are especially striking. While Glendale now resembles several of California’s bustling, multiethnic suburbs, this iteration of the city is relatively new. Only several decades before the interaction I observed at the Armenian café, Glendale was still adapting begrudgingly to rapid demographic changes, which began to take shape in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. It had long been a bastion of conservatism and prejudice. Headquartering the western region’s American Nazi Party and hosting a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, the “sundown town” was notoriously associated with bigotry toward ethnic and racial minorities. Even as recently as 2016, officials from the neighboring community of La Crescenta-Montrose had to remove signage identifying a community space as Hindenburg Park—named after Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany in 1933.2 Historically, the German American Bund and the American Nazi Party had used Hindenburg Park to host rallies and boycott Jewish products. In the face of vehement protest, city officials restored the park to its original name, Crescenta Valley Community Regional Park.3 Nonetheless, the sign brought back to the surface the long, troubling history that Glendale and the San Fernando Valley have had with racism toward ethnic and racial minorities. In Glendale, t hese two realities coexist: exuberant, politicized immigrants, who have done much to transform practically every aspect of the city, and a history rooted in restrictions imposed on and prejudices acted out against minorities.

Before the 1970s, very few Armenians had ever heard of Glendale. Since then, however, a relatively rapid convergence of Armenians from all over the world has fundamentally reconfigured the city. They have established themselves in Glendale with a multitude of Armenian cultural centers, organizations, churches,

restaurants, and businesses. In the past few decades, Glendale has become the most recognizable site of the global Armenian diaspora. On social media, Armenians in the diaspora and the Republic of Armenia often post satiric videos about the extravagances of Glendale and its Armenian residents. It also inspired a racy real ity telev ision series, Glendale Life. Even among non-A rmenian Angelenos, the words Glendale and Armenian are practically synonymous.

Nonetheless, of the many ways Armenians have reshaped Glendale over the last few decades, their role in the city’s political landscape stands out. When I collected data for this book between 2015 and 2018, Armenians made up about 40  percent of Glendale’s two-hundred-t housand-plus population and yet accounted for nearly 70 percent of its elected officials. They served as its mayor, city council members, education board members, and in many other elected capacities. In nonelected positions, they also acted as Glendale’s city manager and deputy city manager; in addition, Glendale Armenians constituted the majority of officials serving on the city’s many boards and commissions.4 This political mobilization has occurred rapidly, too—as of 2018, approximately 70 percent of the Armenian community consisted of first-generation immigrants. Local policies reflect the impact of Armenian political actors, who have increased subsidized

FIg ure 1. Armenian café Urartu Coffee on Artsakh Avenue in downtown Glendale, California.

housing (for the elderly), expanded park space, introduced Armenian/English dual-language immersion programs in public schools, established April 24 (commemorating the Armenian Genocide) as a public school holiday, passed legislation for and financed the creation of a state-f unded Armenian American museum (in the city center), ensured city signage and city literature appear in Armenian, reclassified “Armenian” as a distinct “race/ethnicity” in city demographic data reports, and coordinated many other Armenian-interest initiatives.

When I began collecting data for this book, Glendale Armenians’ electoral success and pol itical influence confused me. Sociologists and pol itical scientists typically assume that legal and social incorporation should occur sooner than political or electoral incorporation. But Glendale’s Armenians consisted predominately of first-generation newcomers—many of whom had no previous experience living in representative democracies. Before I moved to Glendale, I had assumed that non-A rmenians, by campaigning on the promise to advance Armenian-related issues in exchange for Glendale Armenians’ votes, would primarily occupy the city’s governmental positions. But what I found in Glendale proved that t hese assumptions were misguided. How then did a population with so few “social remittances” (Levitt 1998; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011) conducive to pol itical enfranchisement in the United States achieve this level of political influence and electoral success in such a short time—before, indeed, a g reat many had yet even acquired proficiency in English?

As my fieldwork developed, I found that this type of electoral success was not entirely unique to the Armenians of Glendale. As I looked more closely into immigrant political representation within other multiethnic suburbs in Greater Los Angeles, I found t here existed several other places with oversized immigrant or co-ethnic political representation. For the Chinese in San Gabriel County, along with several others, this phenomenon proved particularly conspicuous. Despite the striking differences in terms of Armenian and Chinese immigrants’ backgrounds, their stories follow overlapping trajectories (see chapter 2). Eventually, it became clear to me that what had taken place in Glendale pertained, in fact, to many of California’s increasingly multiethnic suburbs—t hat is, that the political phenomenon I observed in Glendale related more to a statewide, structural evolution than to the specific dynamics taking place within one intra-ethnically diverse population. It was not, however, until I began preparing this book for publication in late 2020 and early 2021—during the aftermath of the contentious presidential election and the tense Senate runoff in Georgia—t hat I realized Glendale Armenians’ political incorporation story is not merely about many of California’s suburbs; rather, it is becoming a new chapter in US political history.

In the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 Senate runoff, suburban Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters in Georgia’s Gwinnett County cap-

tivated the public’s attention. In the media, many journalists speculated that the fate of both elections ultimately came down to AAPI, Black, and Latino suburban voters.5 Of Gwinnett’s over nine hundred thousand residents, Asian residents made up about 12  percent of the population.6 Nonetheless, during the period leading up to the elections, among the five commissioners on the county board, one, Ben Ku, was of Asian descent. In addition, Gwinnett has many AAPI organ i zations, community organizers, ethnic media outlets, and advocacy groups—such as the Asian American Advocacy Fund. In 2020, the most significant national increases in voter turnout occurred among AAPI voters.7 A growing number of t hese voters live in multiethnic suburbs, such as t hose in Georgia’s Gwinnett County. A fter a long, right-leaning history, Gwinnett voted Democratic in both the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections.

Responding to questions about the role of AAPI voters in Gwinnett, the president of the New Georgia Project (NGP), Nsé Ufot, told media sources, “I w ill say that the demographic shifts are the fire and organ i zing is absolutely the accelerant. . . . Phone calls, text messages, knocking on their doors and postcards, as well as digital ads, all together.”8 Organizations such as the NGP, the National Coa lition on Black Civic Participation, and Georgia STAND-UP registered thousands of new voters. And, in the 2020 and early 2021 elections, immigrants and other minorities not only ensured Georgia voted Democratic in the presidential election; they also secured a Democ ratic majority in the Senate by electing a Black pastor, Raphael Warnock, and a Jewish American, Jon Ossoff. In addition to the Black and Latino organizers’ efforts, AAPI organizations, elected officials, and multimedia actors worked tirelessly to register voters. These initiatives played an impor tant role in the election results. As Ufot’s statement indicates, demographic shifts do not solely account for the mobilization of racial and ethnic minorities; rather, the strategies of local organizers play an equally significant role. Even Georgia, a traditional Republican stronghold with a long history of racism against Black and Jewish Americans, exemplifies the increasing prominence of not only suburbs but also the actors constructing voting blocs among ethnically diverse populations. Thus, in this book, I argue that, by creating unified voting blocs out of internally fragmented populations, suburban political actors launch and sustain political careers by driving immigrant political incorporation. And the incorporation of immigrants in multiethnic, multiracial suburbs is transforming the political dynamics of the United States, on local, state, and, increasingly, national levels.9

While this book is ostensibly about Armenians’ rapid pol itical mobilization in Glendale, it is also about the dynamics shaping the pol itic al destiny of the United States. This new chapter in US pol itical history is not without precedent: Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other newcomers within immigrant-concentrated

metropolitan US cities began changing the country’s pol itical landscape from the late nineteenth century onward; similarly, today Armenian, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, and many others are changing the country’s pol itical real ity within its dynamic, multiethnic suburbs. The processes look distinct in t hese various suburban contexts, but the underly ing narrative holds: large populations of newcomers are converging on the United States’ dynamic suburbs, and, at the same time, ambitious political actors are building careers by spearheading co-ethnics’ pol itic al incorporation. These pol itic al actors construct membership among intra-ethnically diverse populations and influence local institutions.

This book presents the story of a recently established population whose members stem from very diverse locations (Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, and many others), and who are internally fragmented and have little experience with the US political system, yet rapidly mobilized and remade a US suburban space in their own likeness.10 As the intra-ethnically diverse Glendale Armenians themselves manifest, this evolution has been driven by the actors constructing a voting bloc based not on a single political ideology but instead on a sense of shared ethnic membership and linked fates (see chapter 4). The emergence of these political actors—whom I label ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and the political incorporation among newcomers in contemporary US suburbs (or “ethnoburbs”) explain significant shifts taking place in the country’s elections and political culture.

Although certainly not the only impor t ant actors in this story, Glendale’s ethnopol itical entrepreneurs had the vision, creativity, and ambition to identify the electoral potential of the internally diverse Armenian population. By tapping into rapid changes in local demography and concentrated ethnic networks, they seized the opportunity to transform a sleepy, prejudicial sundown town into a domain of ethnic pol itic al mobilization and newcomer incorporation. The presence and strategies of t hese entrepreneurs lie at the core of pol itical incorporation among newcomers in Glendale and, by extension, in several other predominantly first-generation, multiethnic US suburbs. It is true that Glendale’s ethnopol itical entrepreneurs exploited what was already in place—in par t icular, co-ethnic demographic convergence on a single site and a strong sense of ethnic identity among this demographic concentration. But, by taking advantage of various other factors, they have fundamentally altered Glendale’s pol itical culture. While t here exists scholarship on both ethnoburbs and immigrant pol itical incorporation, researchers rarely connect the two—t hat is, ethnoburb scholarship rarely analyzes newcomers’ pol itical incorporation, and immigrant pol itical incorporation scholarship rarely applies to suburbs (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004; Rumbaut 2008a; Li 2009; Lung-A mam 2017). This book attempts to connect t hese two scholarly models through a case study of the economically invested and pol itically mobilized Armenians of Glendale.

The Cornell University Press Podcast an intErviEw with Bruce White and raphael alvarez, aBout Don’t Count me out

hoStEd By Johnathan hall

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with author Rafael Alvarez and addictions counselor Bruce White, subject of Raphael’s new book Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery. Rafael Alvarez is a former City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun and former writer for the HBO drama, The Wire. He is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction. Bruce White is an addictions counselor and the founder of One Promise: A counseling, education, and housing program in Baltimore for those struggling with addiction. Bruce got clean in 2003. After decades of active addiction, and use the 12 step program to rebuild his life. We spoke with Raphael and Bruce about how Bruce’s dangerous journey through addiction and his incredible recovery can offer addicts and those who love them hope and inspiration, and how Raphael and Bruce hope the new book and its message will help make a positive difference in the lives of those impacted by addiction. Hello, Rafael and Bruce, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning, Jonathan. Good morning, Raphael. It’s nice to see you guys this morning.

Nice to see you guys. So congratulations on this new book, Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery. I read in the introduction that you go over how you both first met. Tell us about that story. And how that introduction resulted in the book that we now have.

Well, I’ll let Bruce say how he found out about me, and then I’ll tell you about the cool phone call I got in August of 2012.

So I was going to Costa Rica with a buddy of mine. I guess I had a bad 10 or 15 years clean and we started being able to travel outside of the country started having a little bit of finance and stuff. And the guy’s name was Mike Salconi. And Mike Salconi was Detective Mike in the HBO series the wire that Raphael was a writer on and I told Mike about my aspirations of having a book about my life. Because looking at it from outside of myself, it was a great story of redemption and recovery. So I wanted to be able to have somebody document that. And I wasn’t the guy to do it. And he said he knew this guy Rafael Alvarez. And so then here we go to the phone call Rafael.

So it’s, I believe it’s August, late August of 2012. And I’m in LA chasing

TV work. And things were not exactly going my way. Let’s say I had had a good run on The wire. And I had written for NBC for about five years. Then the industry changed. And we had gone on strike as writers. And the phone rings. I’m walking my daughter’s dog, like near the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. And it’s I don’t know the name doesn’t even have a name. But uh it’s a Baltimore area code. So I take the call and in my mind, it went like this. You Rafeal Alvarez in his voice, right? The voice you just heard. I’m like, yeah, and he goes, I hear you’re a writer. I’m like, yeah. And then he says, and this is pure Baltimore. This part he dropped Salconi’s name. And I’ve known Michael Salconi for years for Little Italy, and mutual friends. And in Baltimore, that’s all it takes, you know, he dropped the right name. If he would have dropped some name I’d never heard of it would have been a different conversation. So now he’s got my attention. And not because Falcone was an actor on the wire, but because he was a friend and says, I want you to write my story. And I said, All right, I’ll be back in Baltimore in about two weeks. We made a date for coffee. And we kicked around some of the ground rules. And on this face of it, it was a great story. As I say in the in my introduction. I had written about a lot of bad asses before. But I never actually got to know one to really no one. I had been a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun I wrote about bad guys on The Wire, blah, blah, blah. And the cool thing was that every time I saw I heard the best story Bruce had he topic and then indicated no, I was doing this. But in between our coffee sessions, I go back, and double and triple check with my police sources with documents. Everything he ever told me panned out. So then we started really getting down to the serious work. This is long before we knew there was going to be a Cornell University Press in the game. This is just me and Bruce. One on One banging out a good story.

Wow, wow, it is an incredible story. I mean, I don’t even know how to begin. It’s a it’s a page turner, a lot of the reviewers, both before the book as well, as you know, online and on Amazon things. They say once you open the book, you can’t put it down.

Yeah, a lot of my friends have said they read it in one sitting, which says something in a day and age where the New York Times tell you something’s a five minute read, you know, exactly. Those phrases didn’t exist when I was reading the newspaper as a kid, you know, but um, yeah, a lot of people are reading in one setting.

That’s great. That’s great. And that’s really good, because, you know, a compelling story, but also with a message and a mission. And one of the missions that you have is to kind of make a dent in the stigma of drug addiction. How do you both hope, don’t count me out will make a difference in the world now that it’s out.

That’s a Bruce question.

Jonathan

When I got the inspiration to document my journey, it was never about me. And me being a different being it was about the message of recovery, it was about the message, that there is redemption it was the message that we can recover and we can move forward in our lives. And furthermore, we can be accepted by the highest offices in our judiciaries, and be valued and have the integrity to speak in front of these judges, to speak with the mayor or whoever, and be understood and heard and 100% believed, because you’ve earned that. It was about getting the message out there. I literally, you know, remember, in 2009, walking into the exact courthouse, I’ve walked out with 25 years of prison time, which I’ve done about 12 of that love and a half 12 of that. And people were very nervous. I mean State’s Attorneys and Rafael goes to it elegantly In the book where they didn’t want me in their courthouse, where one one of the judges, Ambrose was know, he needs to be barred when she was a state’s attorney tried to prosecute me for some things that, you know, unsavory type things and, and they let me in. And yesterday, I was buying Girl Scout cookies from one of my friend’s daughters who’s a judge. And when I enter his chambers, he gives me a big hug and tells me how nice it is to see me. So it comes down to like there’s a sociology aspect to the whole thing. Where if I continued working it like Atlas, my first job with this lovely sold Steve Sturgis, who helped me tremendously. When I first came home, from prison, if I’d have stayed there, I would have been a different being than get dropped and immersed into that more refined, gentlemanly society, you know, of wearing a suit and tie every day. You know, obviously today I’m not you know, I’m with you. So, so there was a lot I wanted out of the book, I wanted people to know, you know, that you can recover, you can reenter society. And I had to prove myself year after year after year, I had to prove myself. And what I understood is like, basically, I knew I might be the only copy of the basic text. These people ever see these lawyers and judges and prosecutors ever see. And when it started, it wasn’t like that. I just wanted the message out there. But as it evolved as Rafael and I have worked together for years and years, and evolved into this thing that was bigger than either of us, this this story, and it’s not about me or Rafael, it’s about the message that you can come from where I come from, and you can end up sitting, I’m sitting in my own drug treatment facility, we got 100 beds in in mental health, and I have 23 people working with me. And, you know, it started it started with hope.

That’s great. That’s great. So, so this message of hope, it kind of leads me to one question I had you know that your story, there’s so many twists and turns, it’s an incredible story. And, you know, even says, you know, it’s a miraculous recovery, it does appear like a miracle that you’re here talking to us. Looking back from where you are, from where you are now, was there any running thread that that you feel like kept you alive? During this whole thing?

I think my ignorance to change, I think source energy as I prefer to call it, people call God, whatever. But universal energy that quantum physics

of this particles communicate with that particle in the universe. And, and that I think, just kept me alive. And I think there was purpose in my life. But I had to get through so much to get there. And I don’t think I had to do all this. I think when I made the decision to continue to use him to continue to do this, that the two outcomes were either my my horrific death that I almost met, you know, when I got shot up by the SWAT team, or this, or this, that that was, you know, the two outcomes, I don’t think pardon me. Yeah.

Jonathan, there was several reasons that the first chapter of this book is Bruce’s near death experience after being shot by the SWAT team. One is that it’s a fascinating journey. But to I think it answers, at least for me, your last question to Bruce of what kept him alive. And his, you know, the stereotype of of the Near Death Experience is the white light in the corner, and you gravitate towards it. That was not what Bruce got. Not, you know, nobody wants to think about the flip side of that coin. And, of course, the Near Death Experience chapter, which I put at the beginning, because it encapsulates the whole journey while being very, very provocative. And it was the one chapter I couldn’t double check or triple check or go to Documents for right. But it was very specific. It wasn’t vague at all. And for those who believe, no matter what you want to call it, the names don’t matter. Something wanted Bruce White on this earth. Certainly wasn’t the parents of all the kids that he, you know, went down wrong roads with, there were people who would not talk to me, because years later, they’re still very angry at Bruce, something bigger than all of us. If you read that first chapter, there was a design for him to still be with us. And I feel like I was part of that. There are plenty of writers in Baltimore, you know. And compared to the success I was having in Los Angeles as a TV writer, this is not on that level. This is almost a very private thing. As weird as that sounds, a very public book, but a very private story. Bruce White is supposed to be with us. That’s all that’s as much as I can fathom it. So there you go. That’s powerful.

It’s powerful. Do you think you want to add Bruce to that?

I think Rafael’s said it perfectly. I don’t really know why and I don’t even feel deserving of my life and where I am and what I know it’s not about like things it’s about the work I do, you know, helping the addict is still suffers, you know, my door is always open. I’m the CEO of a fairly large drug treatment facility. And clients will come in here and they’ll sit down in that chair right there. And it’s goingt to make me cry but still. Pardon me. They’ll want to talk about the first step. They want to talk about what what my first step look like with that. So right Under look alike. And they’ll tell me that I’ve never, you know, met the owner of a treatment facility, and I’ve been in 10 of them. And I tell them, that’s the problem. It’s an honor and a privilege for me to be able to serve this population is intimately as I’m allowed to, you know, I have a case of basic texts (Narcotics Anonymous) right over there on that floor. I have a case of Narcan

BrucE

raphaEl Jonathan

right over there on my floor. And when I go down to the service center, the Mayor Frank says, to me, says you’re the only treatment facility that comes in, buys these basic texts to give the clients and, you know, he said, I’m so proud that you still do that. I can’t imagine not given these beautiful souls, the tools they need to recover, you know. So for me, it’s just such a privilege, it’s a privilege to be, you know, I’m a 63 year old man with hepatitis C, destroyed, my liver, didn’t know I had it, you know, I’m sitting here with cirrhosis, and I’m still moving great. And go to the gym, you know, four or five days a week, you know, I haven’t had a substance in my body for more than 19 years, you know, anything, come back and nothing, you know, drink a lot of coffee, you know. But it’s a privilege for me, to be able to interact with the judiciary, the system. And this population. To try to change...I’ve met, many people just need help man they’d need, they need an interruption in the addiction process. You know, so they can get a moment of clarity. A lot of times, we want to promise her that moment of clarity. If that makes sense.

I get asked all the time, Jonathan. Well, how did he quit? How did he you know, after the horrific, you know, first 40 years or whatever. And they will, you know, you want to know. And if you read the book, you’ll realize there was no amount of earthly pain that would get Bruce to quit. And this goes back to the mystery of, of why he’s still here. And I say, for as dramatic as the horror show was, the moment of awakening was very mundane. One day, he woke up and said, I don’t want this anymore. I don’t know. And I’ve heard that so many times, in the work that I do, I don’t know how you get somebody to the point where they wake up and say, You know what, I’m done. That some combination of relation science has yet it’s a billion dollar treatment industry, Bruce knows it far better than I because he’s a professional. science hasn’t cracked this thing. With all due respect to the medical community. It’s got to be science, willingness, and then that weird third wheel of mystery, which all faith is, is a has a component of mystery in it. Over and over again, I’ve heard people who have changed their life the way Bruce has, and that’s whether it’s the, you know, the 60 year old little lady who’s the librarian who can’t wait to have a sherry every night, to the hardcore junkie shooting up in his neck. You know, they’re all the same in a certain degree. They wake up one day, they look in the mirror and they say, I’m done. And no one has been able to crack that nut yet as to how that day arrives. It certainly ain’t bosses, judges, spouses, or the law.

That’s great. That’s great. That makes sense. Yeah. So this this moment of surrender, as you said, a mystery. Science doesn’t have the answers. And that within the 12 step program, the whole idea of hitting bottom, when do you hit bottom when? And you you’re saying that, you know, there were many bottoms in the story, but that one day, as you said it in a mundane fashion, Bruce just woke up and said, Okay, I’ve had enough.

Yeah, he couldn’t even tell me the last time he shocked Oh, he sort of

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raphaEl

knew the week so to speak. But, you know, I wanted that moment. Just like, just like the readers. Bruce, what was the moment where you were done because I think it was a Tuesday, like, Oh, that’s great.

You want this crescendo...and that was not a crescendo, but it was but so much leading up to it. That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating.

I’ll tell you some guys can handle more pain than others? It’s, it’s the pain of it’s the pain that you know versus the pain that you don’t know. I’ve never known anyone that was willing to take more pain than brutes.

I have such a high threshold of pain that we’re at the end of a meeting when we start one, do that moment, a prayer before prayer. I always pray for the addict with the hot threshold and pain, because that’s me. You know, in the day of fentanyl, they’re not getting the chances I got, you know, I shot heroin. I didn’t, you know, we didn’t have that deadly drug. And today, I just see, you know, playing out with differently, you know, we’re losing a lot about next generation counselors, our next drug treatment starters and owners who do it in an ethical, loving, caring way, we’re losing that population to the to the fentanyl epidemic, you know, that’s brutal.

That’s brutal. So, tell us, tell us about so you your system is abstinence based. But then there’s a lot of clinics that use methadone, like as a substitute to control addiction, tell us the advantages of the abstinence based recovery program in your in your mind.

Okay, I drank methadone for about 15 years, maybe a few years longer. It was always my starting point was just to stop me from being sick, until I open my spirit completely up with abstinence, that what the change that you see today that we’re talking about today, Don’t Count Me Out is written about that miraculous change is impossible to happen with MAT’s in you now, one problem is we take people on methadone, now we have a property for them. And we take people on Suboxone, we have property for them. But we’re still abstinence intention. We want people to live because the fentanyl changed, that we were 100% absence did not take people. And then since 2012, or 13. I remember I lost three guys, I sponsored like bam, bam, bam, in like 13. And I started saying we got to do something a little different. So we started structuring a little different. And tried to we get a lot of people now that are on Suboxone. And then when they leave us, they’re not. And they’re so happy when they get off of that. But trust me, I’m supporting you, if you need that, that’s as good as it gets. That’s way better than going out there and playing Russian roulette. And five years ago would have never said that. You know, but today I’m fine. If you’re on drug replacement therapy, you know, it’s not clean, and it’s not sober. And some of those folks want to say they’re clean or sober on Suboxone or methadone. They’re not, you know, but they’re a third tradition says All you need is a desire to stop using. So you’re in

Jonathan

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recovery process, and you’re welcomed into the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous, and we want to help you and love you and get you somewhere different. If that fits you. It’s very personal at this point, you know, and fentanyl has changed that. Okay,

So the symbol for your clinic is says One Promise and then it’s got the Yin Yang symbol. Tell us more about that and the connection to spirit and the spiritual approach.

So I’m working with the sponsor, he’s from Iran after the Shah lost power, he walked over the mountains in Turkey with nothing but an ounce of raw heroin in his sock, because he knew the new regime would have done him. You know, that would have been it for him. And he came here and I met him in 2006. His name was Majeed. And he took me on this spiritual journey. I studied kind of all of the religions from Hinduism, Buddhism, Bodhisattva. You know, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, I kind of looked through everything. I kind of settled in with A Course in Miracles came down, you know, Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Carolyn Myss, you know, all these spirits. Listen, I did. After I finished the 12 steps. I went on this journey for about four years. And at the end, not the end, the journey is still going obviously. But what I came up with was we needed that balance and like, where you have the white and the dark of the Ah, ying yang symbol in the light part is darkness. And in the dark part, there’s light. And that just touched my spirit my heart in such a genuine way that we adopted that symbol.

You know? That’s great. That’s great. So what would you how would you like you have an introduction, obviously to the book, but how would you like to enter that book to them? What would you like to say to that person who may have, who may be an addict themselves or have an addict in their family? What would be kind of like the introduction that you would give like, verbally to someone as you hand them your book?

Let me tell you a funny story that just happened in Los Angeles, like I told you, I’ve written for television out there. For about five years, right before I met Bruce. And I’ve got a lot of friends out there, some of them are still in the business. But the reason I go there is that’s where my daughter and my granddaughter live. And I just got back. And I was having breakfast with someone that you might call a heavy hitter, somebody named dude who had some pool. And of course, I’m a human being Bruce as a human being, we’re very ambitious, you know, I’m in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, you know, maybe this guy can hand this book off to somebody that could make Cornell University a lot of money. So I bring a book along. And this guy is also in recovery. It just so happens. And, and I’m of two minds, because this is really a spiritual book. But at the same time, if we’re in the material world, you know, I’m a working writer, I want success. And in my mind, I’m thinking, you know, how do I ask him to see if he can put this into the right hands? The right hands, right?

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So finally, he goes to the men’s room, and I just put the book at his place. And when he comes back, he goes, Oh, man, thanks. I know exactly who I’m giving this to. Well, let me tell you what, and Steven Spielberg. It was this 32 year old cokehead, who had a couple of weeks sobriety with just destroyed his life. And that is the god of recovery, working to get this book, where it’s supposed to be, my guess is, and Bruce can answer this as well, that it’s not going to be the guy that still shaking or standing in the methadone line or had peed his pants the night before. It’s going to be someone who loves that guy. That’s going to get this book. And then moving along. What would you say, Bruce?

I want to thank Billy Gardell for writing the foreword in the book. I mean, he is a heavy hitter, and I like him in the Mike & Molly show. And it touched my soul when this guy wanted to write the foreword. But for me, the book is about the message of recovery. It’s not about Bruce White did this great stuff. And he recovered in Oh, it’s such a great guy. I’m a guy riddled with anxiety. Still, I had so much anxiety. That’s why I’ve had it for six weeks. My PTSD from being shot of being in motorcycle wrecks, shows up with absolute anxiety. I can kind of do anything I want. I’m financially secure, as F, and this book isn’t about me being more fun. A matter of fact, any profit from this book on my behalf, goes back to the attic, this still suffers. I’m not taking one dime of profit from the wall. It’s about the message, man. It’s about the message that that you can stop using lose the desire to use and find a new way to live to met the message.

There’s a really great part of the book, where Bruce has just been released from prison. And he’s trying to find a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. And he goes to this place where they’re supposed to be helping addicts and they don’t have any directors right. And he’s walking out and this woman by the door who’s half nodded out that she’s a junkie, somehow has overheard all these things have to line up exactly for this stuff to happen. She’s overheard what Bruce has said she reaches in her ratty old shopping bag, enhanced Bruce in Narcotics Anonymous directory and goes here. You can have this I don’t want it. Underline one right. That’s how this book is going to save lives. I’ve been given I’ve given a lot of way we’ve sold a fair amount Somebody’s you know, somebody’s gonna leave, forget it on a bus, somebody’s going to sell it to Goodwill, it’s going to be laying in somebody’s house. And the right person is going to say, Hey, what is this? And that’s the person that’s going to get sober.

That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. So yeah, this idea, you know, Carl Jung would call synchronicity. Some of the faith might call grace, this book has an opportunity and will change lives and helps save someone. And so help save loved ones as well. So I’m really honored and grateful to be able to talk to you guys, I’m so glad that you have worked together from this phone call, you know, over a decade ago to have the book come out, and that this is a book that is going to make a difference, and that that

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message that you have is so hopeful, and I’m so proud that our Press is publishing it and I’m just glad that you guys got together that some synchronicity brought you guys together to make this happen. So thank

Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan, thank you so much for having us today. It was a privilege to be honest with you.

Thank you so much. You guys take care. That was author Rafael Alvarez and addictions counselor Bruce White, talking about the new book, Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery.

THE EXCERPT

A large bundle of numbered keys jingle in a man’s hand as he walks briskly from a car parked on the street toward a three-story apartment building. The man has soft, curly hair and a full, black beard. He is in his late twenties or early thirties. It’s hard to say—his appearance is both relaxed and serious, young and old at the same time. The verdant neighborhood has the typical quiet atmosphere of a Scandinavian suburb built in the 1950s. The man wears sandals, the trees are green, and flowers have been planted by the building’s entrance. The man looks like as if he might have roots in Ethiopia or Eritrea, but he doesn’t come across as someone who has recently arrived in Europe. He’s dressed unremarkably in jeans and a light green polo shirt, and he enters the building confidently, as if it’s his territory.

“Hej, Karl! Do you remember me?” the man says in Swedish. “I’m from Aleris Home Care.”

“Yes, yes,” an elderly voice says.

“I was thinking of helping you with lunch.”

“No, no, no.”

“I can help you to warm up your meal.”

“No, no, no, nothing right now. I’m watching the horse races.”

The viewer is not brought inside, instead hearing the conversation with only a view of the building from the outside. Karl, the elderly client, remains unseen, but the man with the keys is already familiar to the viewer. The scene is from a

short film about Adhanom Rezene, and before the encounter with the old man, we have already seen Adhanom giving a hug to a woman and picking up a toddler in the hallway of a small apartment before leaving for work. A white crucifix hangs from his neck, and on the wall in the background is a poster of a saint on a white horse. Adhanom seems sympathetic and kind—the kind of person anyone would be happy to let in to help with lunch. The woman comes into the shot only briefly, but it’s obvious she is the little girl’s mother, and Adhanom is the father. The woman is about the same age as Adhanom, and she too seems to have roots in the Horn of Africa. The soft early morning sun makes the couple and their home glow: they are a beautiful, happy family.

Adhanom holds the keys not only to Karl’s, but also to many other elderly people’s homes in Stockholm. The film’s story, however, is not about these visits—it is about Adhanom being forced to leave his home and the family that raised him. In Eritrea, “life had no future,” Adhanom says in the film. His voice is heard over scenes of traveling through Stockholm, taking the pendeltåg—the local train— and driving the care service’s car. He narrates his escape from Eritrea’s compulsory, indefinite military service and from the Isaias Afwerki regime that imprisoned him multiple times. Adhanom describes how he survived a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea while crossing from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa on a smuggler’s boat in 2013. At least 366 of his fellow passengers drowned. A cross and the words “God Help Me” are tattooed on his arm. When the camera focuses on the tattoos, their roughness is evident: they were obviously done in conditions where help was truly needed.

The film Remembering Lampedusa/Love (directed by Anna Blom and Adal Neguse) is being shown on a large television screen inside the crew accommodations of the HSwMS Småland, a destroyer in service of the Swedish military from the 1950s until 1979. Adhanom’s story and the visuals of his life and work in Sweden have a particular resonance here inside the warship. Before entering the cool, dark space, smelling of iron and old motor oil, visitors will have walked along the decks of the 396-foot ship, seen defunct missiles, and scaled steep, narrow stairs up and down. One encounters Adhanom’s story rather unexpectedly in the course of following the arrows and signs indicating the route through the large ship. Adhanom’s memories of crossing borders to seek refuge from a present-day conflict stand both in contrast to and as a continuation of Sweden’s maritime and war history. Småland guarded borders that no longer exist in the Baltic Sea, an association that illuminates the ephemerality of present-day borders. Today, Sweden, alongside the other European Union member states, militarily guards Europe’s external border in the Mediterranean Sea, preventing people from certain countries, people like Adhanom, from crossing it safely. One day, that border too will cease to exist.

The Cold War–era ship is docked at the Maritiman maritime museum in Gothenburg, which advertises Småland as the largest Scandinavian warship preserved in a museum. Below deck, visitors can choose to see the film and hear Adhanom tell his story in Tigrinya, with subtitles in Swedish, English, German, or Italian. Adhanom’s film, screened inside the Swedish destroyer, I argue, illustrates well how memories of the disaster travel beyond Lampedusa and live on, becoming a part of the history of the places they reach. Memories of border deaths are inherently part of the history of Europe, including in places beyond the Mediterranean region. In the film, Adhanom recounts his journey from Eritrea to its disastrous encounter with Europe’s border in the Mediterranean Sea. Adhanom risked his life for the chance to have a future, he explains in the film. He narrates the entire journey: his escape from Eritrea to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, his trip through Sudan and Libya, and finally, the dangerous sea-border crossing on a smuggler’s boat to Italy—or rather, almost to Italy. The boat capsized only a kilometer from the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Into a story otherwise told in Tigrinya, Adhanom inserts a Swedish word, ensam (alone, lonely). He has never experienced such loneliness before coming to Sweden, he says, and it seems he has no word for it in Tigrinya. Adhanom talks about the irony of caring for the elderly in Sweden while his own parents get old in Eritrea. “Money is the only thing you can help them with. But there’s more to being human than just money,” he says and pauses.

The film is part of the exhibition Remembering Lampedusa, which recounts the migrant disaster that Adhanom survived in the early morning of October 3, 2013. An overcrowded fishing boat carrying mainly Eritrean refugees from the shore of Libya was approaching the Italian island of Lampedusa when the Tunisian captain, Khaled Bensalem, turned off the engine. In the dark of the night, they waited to be noticed by other boats and to be rescued. As Adhanom recalls in the film: “A ship came and went around us. It had a big searchlight. We said to one another, ‘Stay calm, they are here to rescue us.’ But once they saw us, they left. Or did they see us? I couldn’t tell because of the bright light. We waited, and another ship came and went.” Water started to seep into the boat, and to attract the attention of the islanders and nearby boats, Bensalem set a blanket on fire. The people on the boat panicked, and the commotion on board caused the boat to list. It sank “like the Titanic, the bow went last,” as another survivor, Solomon Gebrehiwet, recalled elsewhere.1

Adhanom is one of 155 people who clung to empty water bottles to stay afloat or managed to swim until they were chanced upon by a group of Lampedusans on an overnight fishing trip three hours later. The bodies of 366 people were recovered over the next few days, including those of all sixteen young children and all but six of the women on board.

The Lampedusa disaster put the issue of migrant border deaths on the public agenda in Europe. Human rights activists had been trying to raise awareness of the watery graveyard the Mediterranean had become since Europe began changing its immigration, visa, and border policies after the Schengen Convention of 1990 (UNITED 2022). The disaster was just one of thousands of migrant disasters, similar in many ways to those that happened before and after it. However, it was also a disaster like no other—its corporeality and proximity to the iconic island of Lampedusa resulted in an unprecedented mediatization and secured its prominence in the European imagination. Since the disaster, the Central Mediterranean route through the Strait of Sicily has continued to be the deadliest migration corridor in the world, with almost 19,000 reported deaths in 2014–2021 (IOM 2022).

This book examines the afterlives of the October 3, 2013, disaster, known in Italy as la strage di Lampedusa, the massacre of Lampedusa. It examines how the disaster continues to reappear in the public sphere through two domains, representation and memorialization. It then analyzes the politics, subjectivities, and relationships that emerge through the disaster’s afterlives. How does the disaster shape not only the lives of individuals, families, and communities, but also the European Union, which created the conditions in which the natural forces of the sea kill certain people?

This book continues the line of research that has been opened by critical migration scholars who argue that borders and practices of bordering are productive: they generate subjects and subjectivities (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Anderson, Sharma and Wright 2011; McNevin 2011). I examine how four types of witnesses engage with the disaster through representations and memorializations: Most people witnessed the disaster from a distance, through the media. Then, there were those who witnessed the corporeal aftermath of the mass death with their own eyes in Lampedusa or in Sicily, where the dead were buried. Some of these eyewitnesses and mediated witnesses refused to remain bystanders and felt a responsibility to act upon what they saw. They refused to live on as if a disaster like the strage di Lampedusa was an unintended yet unavoidable consequence of the bordering of Europe. I also follow survivors who lived through the disaster, who have an embodied experience of it. Finally, I consider the family members of victims, who bear witness to the human consequences of the disaster in their intimate lives and relationships.

Survivors and relatives of victims are specific kinds of witnesses not only because of their intimate relationship with the disaster and the dead but also because of the specific transnational conditions in which the afterlives of the disaster unfold. Families are often dispersed and divided by borders. Survivors and relatives must navigate not only the institutional and social environments of

Europe, where they reside or where the dead bodies are managed, but also their diasporic communities and relationships with the state they left behind.

In the analysis of afterlives, I am specifically interested in how victims, survivors, and relatives of victims are represented in mediated images and narratives and what kinds of roles they are given by others in memorials and commemorative rituals. I am also interested in how survivors and relatives interact with representations and memorializations—how they insert their identities, politics, and agency into the scenes of the event’s myriad afterlives. This methodological approach is influenced by critical refugee studies, which emphasize the agency, sociality, and subjectivity of refugees (see, e.g., Nguyen 2012; Espiritu 2014; Hong 2016), and by the autonomy of migration approach, which shifts the focus in migration studies from apparatuses of control to the autonomous ways in which migrants operate in spite of restrictions (see, e.g., Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013; de Genova 2017). Focusing on agency is not an attempt to romanticize survival or trauma, but rather a way to learn how people live on and find their own ways to act politically and critically from the position of survivorship.

The book is based on multisited research, with the commemorations held on the anniversary of the disaster in Lampedusa functioning as an important site. I attended commemorations in Lampedusa in 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2021. There I came to know thirteen survivors of the disaster, as well as the families of three victims. Nine of the survivors became involved in my ethnographic research, and I regularly visited six of them in Sweden, where they had settled. The survivors most closely involved in this research are all men, which is in part due to the fact that only six women survived. Two women gave interviews for the research, but they are not among those who have been keen on staying in touch about the project over the years. Two of the survivors knew English well, and I was able to communicate with them directly from early on. The other survivors and I began conversing in Swedish about two years after we first met in 2014. Before that, I had mainly relied on the interpreting skills of Adal Neguse, the brother of one of the victims of the 2013 disaster.

Not having a common language with survivors in the beginning was the most difficult aspect of the study. I also had to rely on translations and interpretations of Italian. Because I am from Finland, I was always an outsider, lacking to some degree in my capacity to understand the languages and cultures at each of the sites—Sweden, Germany, Italy, and online. While this limited my research, I believe it also helped me to create a sympathetic relationship with people I observed. Sometimes, our shared Nordic context created a bond when survivors or relatives of victims and I encountered situations in Italy that were unfamiliar to us in Sweden and Finland.

In this multifaceted research, conversations with Eritrean Europeans have been central in my analysis of mainstream media, social media, diasporic media, art, film, and literature. I have also analyzed different types of official documents, for example, Italian parliamentary debates in 2016 about the establishment of October 3 as a National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Immigration. I searched European Union databases for instances where the October 3, 2013, disaster was mentioned. During my visits to Lampedusa, I met with rescuers and other Lampedusans, including the activists of the Askavusa collective and the island’s political and religious leaders. I conducted interviews with Eritrean human rights activists in Europe and visited cemeteries in Sicily where the dead are buried, talking with locals there about their practices of attending migrant graves. Teddy, a young man in his twenties from Hamburg, invited me to accompany him to a cemetery in Sicily, where he was searching for his older brother’s grave. Some of the people I interviewed wish to be identified in this book by their own names. Others have decided to use pseudonyms.

Adal Neguse and I first met in Lampedusa in October 2014, but it was on our ways home from Italy that we had our first long conversation, while waiting for our connecting flights in Rome. Adal told me he had watched the morning news on October 3, 2013, while getting ready to go to work at his job at a health care services provider in Stockholm. By then, he had been living in Sweden for ten years, after having arrived as a resettlement refugee from a camp in Sudan. The news worried him, particularly because he had woken up around 2 a.m. and been unable to go back to sleep. Adal feared the worst. He had sent money to his younger brother Abraham, who was waiting in Libya to be smuggled to Europe. Adal called the smuggler, who assured him that Abraham had not been on the boat that sank. Adal did not trust the smuggler and decided to fly to Lampedusa immediately to find out if his brother had been on the boat. He showed Abraham’s photo to survivors at the reception center on the island, and one woman nodded her head. Abraham was dead.

My conversation with Adal at the airport, which we carried out in Swedish, made me reflect for the first time on how disasters at Europe’s borders were not so distant from my own lifeworld in Finland. Adal and I stayed in touch, and he became an important coresearcher and a dear friend. I was struck by how little, despite our globalized world, was communicated in the media and academic literature about relatives’ and survivors’ experiences of migrant disasters. They were hardly visible—at least as complete human beings—in depictions of disasters and their aftermath. Survivors of disasters disappeared from the public domain after the initial news reports, where they were usually depicted as objects of care, exhausted, and wrapped in emergency foil blankets. What happened to these people afterward? Who were they? Who did they become? These questions

thrEE QuEStionS with DENISA KOSTOVICOVA

author of reconciliation by Stealth

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

One December day I had an interviewee scheduled in Sarajevo, the country’s capital, with a representative of an association that gathered survivors and family members of the missing. A couple of hours before the interview, they called me and apologized for not being able to make it. My interviewee was unable to make it to Sarajevo because they stopped to have a break in a village on the way. Out of the blue, a local belonging to the “enemy” side approached them and tipped them off about a location of a mass grave. Its existence and location had not been known previously. The

ethical dilemmas arising in unpredictable interactions with people touched by war.

Discussions of research ethics have become increasingly important at universities and professional associations of political science and international relations researchers, especially in relation to research conducted in conflict and post-conflict contexts. However, research ethics protocols that guide ethical research with victims of war-time violence have yet to catch up with many ethical dilemmas these research encounters raise.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

local could no longer live with a conscience of knowing about it and not telling. The representatives of this victim association decided to stay in the area to make further inquires and arrange for the excavation on the site.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I had known more about how unpredictable it is to conduct research involving victims of violence and family members of the missing. I conducted my research applying the highest standards of research ethics, as mandated and approved by institutional procedures in place at my university. However, the issue here is that the professional guidance on ethical research had not adequately addressed

It is a truism that “before a person is killed by a bullet, they are killed by a word.” Exclusive discourses dehumanize people on the opposing side foreshadowing violence and human rights abuse. But discourse also plays a crucial role in attempts to restore relations across a conflict divide and rebuild relations torn by violence.

To date, scholars have used discourse in the context of post-conflict justice and reconciliation as a proxy for attitudes, identities, and norms in transitional justice. However, they have neglected to center discourse in their analysis, and identify rigorously its patterns that can provide direct evidence about possibilities for post-conflict reconciliation as well as about its obstacles.

Exclusive discourses dehumanize people on the opposing side foreshadowing violence and human rights abuse.

thrEE QuEStionS with ANCA PARVULESCU & MANUELA BOATCA authors of Creolizing the Modern

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Ion Bodijer, the peasant on which Rebreanu modeled his fictional character Ion, found out there was a novel circulating in the world in which he is the main character. So, he wrote a letter to Rebreanu, asking for half of the profit from the novel, claiming that he had contributed to it with his personality. The writer rejected the premise of the letter, responding that he is not guilty of personality theft.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

We set out to offer an account of Transylvania’s inter-imperiality—the defining condition of areas of the world situated between multiple empires vying for control. We started writing our book five years ago. Little did we know that inter-imperiality would come back with a vengeance in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and that questions of Europeanness, belonging, whiteness, radicalization, creolization will be at the forefront of everyday debates. In other words, we set out to write a historical account

Little did we know that inter-imperiality would come back with a vengeance in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and that questions of Europeanness, belonging, whiteness, radicalization, creolization will be at the forefront of everyday debates.

This is our favorite anecdote in our book, for several reasons: It links the fictional world of the novel to the historical world. Ion Bodijer is, of course, the actual historical heir to the history of serfdom, the land problem, and peripheralization—the issues we discuss in our book. Ion’s request to Rebreanu functions as confirmation that this small village in Transylvania is integrated into the capitalist world-economy, where personalities do sell, and where a peasant knows enough about its workings to claim copyright over an individual life story.

of inter-imperiality in East Europe, which we knew had an important bearing on the present. Since then, however, the questions at the heart of our study have returned as some of the most pressing questions of the present.

3. How do you wish you could change your field?

If we could change our two fields, we would advocate for the cross-pollination of our disciplinary methodologies, as well as for a global perspective for both, along the lines of the discussion of world literature and world-systems analysis we undertake in the book.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

A FEW WORDS ON SENSELESS DESTRUCTION

I have a confession to make. When I was in fifth grade I brought a box cutter from home and slashed up the back seat of my school bus. I am not really sure why I did it. I was a quiet and bookish kid, I liked the bus driver, and although an apathetic student I did not have any particular hostility toward the school. The act was senseless in a way that I found mystifying even at the time. What on earth could have possessed me? That was what the principal wanted to know as well, although he asked in a tone of exasperation rather than genuine wonder. He was on the edge of retirement and I can only imagine how many cases like mine he had confronted over his career. Broken windows and gouged desks. Ink and whiteout on the walls. Now a butchered bus seat. He sighed as he assigned me a detention and sent me back to class. The wantonness and waste that make individual acts of vandalism so frustrating must become even more incomprehensible over the years. Vandals seem to act on pure impulse, in ways that defy explanation or prevention. Who knows why do they do it?

There is a lot riding on that question. In the United States, vandals destroy over $600 million worth of school property every year, diverting scarce resources for maintenance and repair. Racist and sexist graffiti are pervasive, and there can be links between vandalism and other forms of criminal behavior, such as gang activity. Studies suggest that degraded school facilities make many students feel unsafe and can significantly impede learning.1 Given these negative associations, there is an understandable expectation that schools should do something about vandalism. But what can they do? It is difficult to respond to a problem without a clear understanding of its source, and property destruction, a phenomenon

with complex causes, is usually answered with narrow and ineffective remedies. In 1978, Vernon Allen and David Greenberger wrote that “current theoretical accounts of vandalism could be extensively criticized,” and they singled out the scholarship on school vandalism as “acutely embarrassing.”2 Their criticism remains true today. Research on the issue is varied to the point of incoherence. Some characterize vandalism as violence, requiring stricter forms of deterrence and punishment. Others attribute it to problems in the school or society at large, best addressed by antipoverty programs, antiracist pedagogy, beautification projects, or new forms of community governance. Still others interpret vandalism as a developmental pathology, demanding therapeutic intervention. Social scientists pinball between new theories without advancing a comprehensive view of the issue, or narrow their selection of cases in ways that overdetermine its causes. Like the parable of the blind men with the elephant, different modes of inquiry have come to wildly different conclusions, making vandalism not only a practical but a conceptual problem.

Perhaps the confusion is to be expected, for vandals do not speak with a single voice. They are not always children, do not necessarily come from either dominant or marginalized groups, and do not all engage in the same forms of destruction. Vandalism cuts across demographic lines and afflicts every kind of educational institution, from one-room schoolhouses to large urban high schools. There are many reasons to light a fire or scratch a wall, and to describe an act as vandalism can obscure what is in fact an array of behaviors and motivations. Thus, any consideration of why individuals deface schools must draw from a range of academic disciplines—criminology, psychology, even philosophy—while at the same time preserving an element of fundamental uncertainty, an acknowledgment that the sources of destruction will sometimes remain unknowable.

This book sifts through centuries of debris to uncover multiple meanings of school vandalism. By taking a longer view of the issue, it hopes not only to move past the sensationalism of contemporary media reports but to expand the boundaries of existing scholarship, which remains narrow and poorly integrated. It does so in a somewhat unorthodox way. Rather than a single chronological narrative, it offers three parallel accounts of property destruction, communicated in three distinct styles. Each of these accounts invites readers to approach the issue from a different historical perspective. Fuller explanations will appear as the book proceeds, but a quick sketch at the outset should help readers understand how these three parts fit together and how interweaving multiple interpretations of the past may shape our responses to vandalism in the present.

The first account, which unfolds across four chronological chapters, interprets property destruction as an assertion of power. Painted messages, broken windows, and burned-out buildings are often demands for justice by those who

lack more articulate means of dissent, not random destruction but a rational and implicitly political bid for recognition. Taking this type of opposition seriously reveals the hidden agendas of schooling and reframes attempts to prevent or punish vandalism as equally political acts. The chapters in part 1 can help readers understand structural changes in the design and administration of schools, implicit assumptions about student misbehavior, and the demands of otherwise unheard children and adults. In drawing attention to unruly forms of resistance, the chapters also raise larger questions about social control and noncompliance in US education.

A second account focuses on schoolchildren in particular and argues that while vandalism is not always political, neither is it wholly destructive. Sometimes property damage communicates needs that are creative, sensitive, and intensely personal, having less to do with negotiations of power than with nascent self-discovery. In these cases, vandalism plays an educational role parallel or even incidental to the official school curriculum. The marks that children leave on their surroundings suggest an emotional fullness that rarely appears in histories of education or childhood: an opportunity to see individuals achieving selfhood in moments of drudgery, wistfulness, or sheer abandon. In short, vandalism offers a glimpse into interior states of being. Part 2 explores these issues through a series of essays, each of which pairs a historical artifact with an emotional impulse to deface it. Ambiguous evidence makes these pieces brief and necessarily speculative, but by incorporating interdisciplinary insights from philosophy and social theory, the essays allow readers to reconsider assumptions about how and what children really learn in school. Indeed, their conjectural approach encourages new perspectives on education in both the past and the present, asking how destructive acts may impart deeper lessons about meaning, belonging, and selfhood.

A final account concedes that some acts of vandalism may be just as senseless as critics claim—what one sociologist describes as “sheer deviltry”—but that senselessness makes them no less significant.3 While random acts of destruction can be difficult to distinguish from the more purposeful varieties listed above, their ambiguity and irrationality raise important questions about historical interpretation. If an act were entirely impulsive, indeterminate, or wanton, could it be said to be without cause? Would the existence of such an act challenge our understanding of the past as an orderly and intelligible sequence of events? What if there were thousands of such acts? Simply put, to what extent can historical narrative accommodate meaningless absurdity? This book engages these questions not through explicit scholarly argument but aesthetically, particularly in its reliance on anecdotal evidence and its orientation to the sublime. This suggestive, somewhat stylized approach appears sporadically throughout the chapters and

essays, but it becomes most explicit in part 3, which presents a short chronicle of school vandalism stripped of chronology or context. This may seem like the most tenuous of the three accounts—hardly history at all—but it is a necessary addition to the earlier parts of the book. By following the causes of vandalism outward (to the systems of power in which schools are enmeshed) and inward (to the soul or subconscious), one begins to grasp tensions between society and the individual. By acknowledging that vandalism sometimes occurs without causes, one can discern all-too-human moments of unruliness and wreckage.

It may be that searching for the meaning of vandalism yields results that authorities would rather not acknowledge, that children only dimly grasp, or that fit awkwardly into existing historical accounts, but these all have important implications for our responses to the phenomenon. Most importantly, surveying the many sources of destruction should temper policy decisions with a degree of humility and forbearance rather than simple condemnation. It should also preserve an element of curiosity or wonder. In the preface to a book of advice from high school students to their teachers, Kathleen Cushman writes, “It’s a safe bet that in random high schools all over the United States, some kid has just set the bathroom wastebasket on fire. And deep down, all of us know why.”4 For Cushman, taking property damage seriously demands that we consider the structural sources of student discontent, as well as our own emotional experiences of schooling. These are both important sources of knowledge, but they remain incomplete. So varied are the sources of deviant behavior, and so different the contexts in which it plays out, that any study of vandalism should begin by admitting that we can never fully explain why people wreck schools in the first place. Even when we look “deep down,” destruction remains something of a mystery. There are feelings that are hard to put into words, and fires that are hard to put out.

Part I

VANDALISM AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE

Authorities often describe vandalism as a wanton act, making it seem both purposeful and purposeless, the result of conscious decisions but lacking clear objectives or a coherent message. That contradiction performs several functions. First, it ascribes culpability to perpetrators without establishing their intellectual or moral capacity for wrongdoing. Doing so violates basic principles of justice and is especially problematic when applied to children, whose criminal immunity has given way in recent decades to punitive disciplinary policies and children’s reclassification as adult offenders.1 Wantonness also prioritizes property over human well-being, suggesting that destruction originates within a deranged individual rather than as a response to unacceptable conditions, and that monetary costs are more important than understanding, rehabilitating, or truly correcting the culprit. Because wantonness is incomprehensible, it seems to preclude forgiveness or the basic educational notion that wrongdoers should learn from their mistakes. Finally, it strengthens established sources of authority by implying that resistance to them is inherently irrational. Freighted with unspoken assumptions about vandals’ depravity, wantonness forecloses investigation into the actual sources of their behavior, ignoring injustice and inviting overly harsh responses.2

There are good reasons to reject this characterization, to interpret destructive acts as meaningful signifiers and perpetrators as rational agents, even if they sometimes seem mistaken in their choice of targets. Doing so draws attention to the hidden structures against which vandalism is directed, forcing one to examine the built environment of schooling, the systems of governance, administration, and instruction in which damage plays out, and the theories of childhood and

criminality that ascribe meaning to it. These are shifting categories, and none of them are neutral. Schools necessarily impose forms of control on both children and communities, and property destruction has been a means for many groups to express their dissatisfaction with the powers that be. Thus, vandalism orients us to the inescapably political dimensions of schooling and the latent power of its subjects, who express their opinions in everyday acts of disobedience.

Unmasking the connections between property destruction and power relations has long been a pillar of Marxist scholarship. Beginning in the 1970s, historians such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm introduced readers to an eclectic group of squatters, bandits, and saboteurs from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They reinterpreted these outlaws, previously dismissed as misfits or opponents of progress, as critics of the industrial order, and acts of wreckage as a form of political protest. Inarticulate ruffians found new voice in their struggle against capital and the state, becoming sources of inspiration and popular resistance in the present.3 More recently, historians such as Robin D. G. Kelley have emphasized the “daily, unorganized, evasive, [and] seemingly spontaneous actions” of African Americans and others in resisting racist indignities. Far from acquiescence or petty criminality, for these scholars acts of mischief and noncompliance derive from a broader political consciousness.4

Similar arguments have appeared in educational literature as “resistance theory,” which portrays the oppositional acts of working-class children as a struggle against systems of cultural and economic stratification.5 Resistance theorists see misbehavior not as a personal failing but as a way to defy injustice, ascribing meaning to otherwise incomprehensible forms of student protest.6 Defiance implies a degree of personal agency, which ostensibly differentiates resistance theory from more mechanical accounts of cultural reproduction. Rather than observing a strict correspondence between economic forces and institutions such as schools—reducing students to passive victims of the capitalist system— resistance theorists envision children exercising power to some effect. As one writer remarks, “We do a disservice by turning ‘hooligans’ into a pure reflex of capitalism, their degree of viciousness depending upon current wage restrictions and the level of unemployment. . The nice bright-eyed working class kid in acting out his frustration is affirming life, affirming the possibility of influencing his environment, in no matter what blind way.”7 Thus, misbehavior offers both an opportunity for structural critique and a space for individual agency.

The image of blind striving, however, also speaks to an unresolved relationship between agency and self-awareness at the heart of resistance theory. In rejecting accusations of wantonness, resistance theorists ascribe to children not only power but intentionality and some degree of political consciousness. Noncompliance may be an entirely reasonable reaction to schools that routinely fail working-class

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