When advocates seek inclusion in institutions, they tend to lift up and valorize those institutions, which means ignoring and erasing the violent realities of those institutions. When we work to put vulnerable people at the center, we see these institutions very differently and make different strategic choices about how our movements should intervene on them.
From the perspective of populations for whom the police are a force of racialized terror, passing legislation to enhance resources to local police does not make sense as a method of increasing safety. When we put criminalized people, undocumented migrants, poor people, people with disabilities, and indigenous people at the center of our analysis, the institutions of the US government look very different, and celebrating them and asking for entrance into them becomes questionable.
It is essential to do this because when we do not, we end up producing advocacy that actually participates in and colludes with the perpetuation and expansion of harm for the most vulnerable people. Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.
However, I am not arguing that we should never use legal reform as a tactic. Instead, I argue that it should not be a goal.
We should understand that in the context of the US, where our legal system is based in settler colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy, changing laws will never sufficiently change the conditions of harm and violence our movements seek to transform.
Instead, we should interact with legal reform tactically, knowing that it will not meet our ultimate goals but asking whether there are ways that engaging with particular reforms might benefit our work and help reduce certain harms or dangers. When we approach legal reform work, we can ask questions like: Will this provide actual relief to people facing violence or harm or will it primarily be a symbolic change? Will this divide our constituency by offering relief only to people with certain privileged statuses such as people with lawful immigration status, people with jobs, married people, etc.
Will this legitimize or expand systems we are seeking to dismantle? These questions often require complex analysis and do not always have predictable answers, but if our decisionmaking spaces are participatory, horizontally structured and center the leadership of people most impacted by the systems we are discussing, we are likely to produce useful analysis about these questions.
Still, we must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies.
Indeed, these influences are apparent throughout the text. But your argument also hangs on a deployment of Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power and population management, as laid out in most detail in the third chapter.
What was your impetus for putting these diverse framings together? DS: Over the past decade I have watched many friends go through graduate school and write dissertations. Through that process, I have seen how they are guided by mentors to understand particular norms within their disciplines and to learn about what they can and cannot, should and should not say, and which ideas can go together and which cannot. I never went through this process. I went to law school which is a 3-year program in the US that is focused primarily on memorizing certain doctrines and taking exams that test whether you can apply those doctrines to help prepare for the bar exam.
If you are lucky, you get a few classes where you are encouraged to think more critically and read critical texts rather than just casebooks, and perhaps write a paper that is not a legal memo or brief. Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me—anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered—I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.
For this reason, I think my engagement with these various intellectual traditions is somewhat undisciplined in ways that I imagine may irk some academic readers, and might also be refreshing or useful to some activist or undergraduate readers who want to understand how these various tools and methods emerge from and are engaged by social movements. In the book, I aim to introduce key concepts from Foucault that I have found particularly useful for understanding the limitations of legal equality reforms and the need for attending to the administration of state violence.
Rather than asking for state declarations forbidding discrimination or violence against trans people, I argue that we should examine how systems that administer life and death—social welfare systems, education systems, health systems, criminal punishment and immigration systems—mobilize racialized gender norms as a central tool of their operations. When we turn our attention there, we move from demanding reforms that reframe these systems as including us while they continue to enact racialized-gendered violence, to developing nuanced strategies that help support people trying to survive these systems and move toward transforming the root conditions that perpetuate their capacity to exert control.
In Normal Life, I tried to translate some of these concepts from Foucault into language that would ideally be readable to audiences both within and outside universities.
Reading Foucault has helped me critically engage regimes of practices congealed in state forms that articulate themselves as delivering freedom, are legitimized as consensual or contracted by the governed. Those who have never been able to avail themselves of the supposedly universal rights of liberal states—privacy, speech, assembly, bodily autonomy, political participation, property and the like--tend to produce the insightful accounts of the fictive nature of such universalisms.
Similarly, such accounts frequently include sophisticated anti-institutional critiques that examine the root violences that produce key institutions of governance and control and suggest that reforms often merely tinker with such institutions in ways that perpetuate rather than dismantle their capacity for violence.
I wrote Normal Life using concepts that have been helpful to me, and hoping to offer those as accessible tools for thinking differently about the pitfalls trans resistance faces, in particular the temptation to focus on legal equality and the limitations of that approach, and the alternative approaches being taken by racial and economic justice focused trans activists.
Perhaps the arguments in the book could have been made without using Foucault, because many of the key critical moves I pick up from Foucault—a critique of rights, a critique of institutionalization, an understanding of violence at the level of population--have counterparts in other intellectual traditions I use. I used the tools that helped me get to these ideas, but I think there are many paths to them. When I teach classes like Poverty Law and Law and Social Movements year after year, as I change the syllabi and experiment with new materials or case studies I often notice how students can gain the capacity to use certain critical methodologies through engaging with very different texts—how a graphic novel about gentrification and an anthology about Hurricane Katrina and a journalistic account of war profiteering might all lead to very similar classroom conversations and critical engagement.
I strive to find materials that will engage them, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems. NO: Your frequent use of spatial metaphors in Normal Life is striking. For instance, you describe trans lives as particularly precarious because they "do not fit" into gendered administrative systems, you problematize the "narrowing" of the US LGBT movement in recent years, and you argue for a critical trans politics that "de-centers" law reform work.
More broadly, the book can be read as sort of space-opening gesture, both for activists and scholars. Is this implicitly geographical thread in the writing an intentional one?
I see the concepts spatially in my mind. I see the boxes and corrals and grids into which administrative systems require people, things and information to be fit in order to be legible, made to live, or in order to facilitate death and abandonment. I love the Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure framework developed by the Miami Workers Center that I use in the book because its so visual and I find that students and activists who I share it with remember it because they can picture the four pillars.
I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful.
In recent years I have become more interested in making the critical ideas that I love teaching and talking about available in more forms, because many people prefer to engage with ideas in films, infographics, comics and other forms that are not traditional books or articles. I am working on several projects with collaborators who are visual artists and filmmakers that aim to capture critical ideas in visual forms.
Harris, Carmen Gonzalez and Yolanda Niemann Released as final report November Professor Dean Spade says smaller studies that look at specific issues are often the most helpful. Professor Dean Spade says mutual aid is the "bread and butter" of all social movements.
Professor Dean Spade's new book on mutual aid provides a "critical framework" for movements. An excerpt of Professor Dean Spade's interview about trans military service is included in this piece. This opinion piece quotes Professor Dean Spade's warning that activists should avoid being self-congratulatory.
Professor Dean Spade's new book is featured in this article about pooling resources and building a more just society. Professor Dean Spade's book on mutual aid is cited in this article detailing the history of the movement. I had the great fortune to be part of this discussion about abolition in with Gina Dent, Dawn Harrington and Ivan Calaff.
I recently got to do a political education workshop about mutual aid for a group I really admire, CAT They are working to build ways of responding to emergencies without calling the cops, and their work is very thoughtful and inspiring! Conditions are already disastrous and getting worse under the new presidential administration. We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on.
He is a member of famous Lawyer with the age 44 years old group. At 44 years old, Dean Spade height not available right now. He is currently single. He is not dating anyone. We don't have much information about He's past relationship and any previous engaged. According to our Database, He has no children.
His net worth has been growing significantly in So, how much is Dean Spade worth at the age of 44 years old? He is from American.
0コメント