The topics discussed include the importance of autonomous education, indyclass logistics, and decision-making by consensus.

This is a great place to start for students interested in starting up their own indyclass.

Video by David Koch

Contact davidgkoch (at) gmail.com

For a written outline of how to start an IndyClass, check out this Course Evaluation and Retrospective, which is mentioned in the video.

Introduction:

Timeline:

Indyclass Logistics and Ground Rules

Consensus and Group Decision-Making

Thanks for watching.

This blog is an archive of the IndyClass website for our first instalment, in Fall 2008. It contains all the minutes, readings and posts from that semester.  Current indyclasses can be found at indyclass.wordpress.com.

How do we make prisons obsolete?

Language/discourse

-government is in state of trespass on stolen Native land (change the terms of ownership)

-“victim” vs. “criminal” = problematic

-“security” – question whose security, etc.

Decriminalization

-sex work

-immigration

-survival crimes

-non-status people

Social Services/programs

-rehabilitations

End genocidal policies to Indigenous people

-“Third World” nation situation

-recognize demands

-land claims

-Olympics

Food security (?word)

-communal eating

-urban agriculture

Rape criminalization: looks at bodies as private property

Listening to survivors of sexual assault for ideas on rehabilitation

Bringing more anti-oppressive/anti-racist analysis to problems.

Conflict Resolution on smaller levels

Pushing for reform vs. Abolition?

-reforms should force people to shift money into the services sector (e.g. from prisons/military to…)

Community justice/Mediation/Restorative Justice

Get rid of bail (i.e. needing to give money for bail)

No imprisonment before conviction.

No mandatory minimums.

No forced prison labor.

Free and accessible education.

Popular education

-including edu. on listening, non-violent communication

Less or NO money to “national security”

Financial stability of collective, not just individual

More structures for communal living.

Create new forms of wealth redistribution

-collective bank accounts

-funding

Independent media.

Decarceration.

No borders.

Getting lawyers on side.

Getting rid of police structure/surveillance culture

-cop watch, deter police brutality

Networks for bail money for incarcerated activists.

1) go around

2) recon situation last monday

3) general activism responsibility

4) future plans with recon

5) indyclasses for next semester

6) checkouts

1)

It’s getting near the end of the semester. We’re doing alright, considering the circumstances.

2)

Recap:

There were five people who were possibly going to go to the Recon meeting. Four people were question marks, and Marina. Marina went, and was there when Gaby was there (where she was supposed to be…) but didn’t meet her. Taylor was one of the question marks, and didn’t realize there was a consequence of not going. We should have considered that four might not go, and we should have set up a meeting point for all of us beforehand so Marina didn’t end up going alone. Theresa told Marina she wasn’t going, but not anyone else.

On the Friday before, perhaps we should have eliminated the question marks and decided for sure who was going. We should have recognized the importance of communication since there were still question marks. We shouldn’t just rely on email, assuming people will see it. Also, Gaby didn’t have a cell phone, and that meant we should have figured out how we were going to meet up not knowing each other or the place. We should have had a phone contact list (as GRASPe does based on these same organizing issues). It should not just be a phone list, but also a communication accessibility list (cell or home phone, frequency of email checking, etc.)

A phone list wouldn’t necessarily have fixed this situation. It is also important for people who are going to go to something to meet face to face, exchange phone numbers, make plans. Technology doesn’t always work out. Face to face ensures more confidence and distributes responsibility better.

There was unawareness of the effect of our being (or not being) at the prison, and realizing this impact would reinforce the feeling of responsibility in deciding to go or not to go. And we didn’t realize that impact until after no one went.

Not everyone was at both meetings last week, so Nat wasn’t sure who had been talked to about what. So not everything got communicated, so it was just an email of Nat reporting stuff. Email doesn’t work as well, and takes more time. We spend more time emailing than actually being around people when we organize, but also it’s not possible to have everyone go to every meeting…

3)

People who are doing something they should meet with each other beforehand. Also, students situations need to be taken into consideration in terms of reliability, both over months and days (especially near the end of semesters).

When there is an important liaison role (as Nat had with Gaby), there should be a supporter person to check in on things and share responsibility (a liaison-liaison). We sometimes feel like we want to check in with people on their responsibilities, but don’t want to be the nagging taskmaster. So this would be an advantage to having a second person with responsibility. For tasks that happen outside of the group meeting, when someone takes on an important task, someone could also volunteer to check-in with them on it. For check-ins there can be a general check-ins, followed by responsibilities check-ins. That would be good because it could mean people could take on tasks without feeling as though it would be a disaster if they weren’t able to do everything. Also, tasks can be divided into smaller pieces, and among more people.

We started off talking about connections to the community, but then that didn’t really happen, except for the Recon stuff (Cleve and Nat at one meetings…) and a few people coming to our meetings.

In activist groups there is unspoken guilt, and awareness of what people are (and are not) doing, and value judgments attached to that. And people shouldn’t feel guilty, and it should be talked about in a way that isn’t pressuring people to feel like they should be doing more. And maybe if no one can do something, there should always be the option of not doing it.

Intersections of activism and ability and mental health. The evaluation of whether someone should be or is able to do something ends up falling on the individual instead of the group, and there isn’t a space created for people to discuss their situation in terms of what they are able to do.

4)

Taylor is going to be the contact person with Peggy, and Nat is her check-in person. This Monday is their inside meeting at QPIRG-Concordia from 7pm-9pm. We’ll assume no one is going, and if someone wants to they should email Nat.

5)

Indyclasses for next semester reportback:

- Dana and Rosie from Tapthirst are going to do something like an indyclass on water issues next semester

- Joel and Sarah from SSMU might do one on student movements

- MICLA (mining research group) is doing undergrad research stuff, and there is the chance it could take the form of an indyclass…

6)

Everyone thought we had a really good discussion about activism, responsibility, and ability!

PS. anti-capitalism (to each according to their need, from each according to their ability) needs to be taken into account in activist group dynamics.

Aviva is writing her paper on parallels between residential schools and prisons. First section is on how both prisons and residential schools perpetuate colonialism. (they physically relocate native people into spaces that are defined as white) – the arch of both prisons and residential schools create territories that allow the colonial gaze access to native peoples. Physically separate native peoples from their lands. Second section; both institutions physically strip native peoples of their identity. Physically force the students to look like a white person – same as in prison, right to where what you want, have your hair the way you want is not there in prison. Prisons criminalize native identity. In residential schools studenst would be beaten for expressing their native identities. In prisons too, historically, it was illegal to do sundances. Colonizing and enforcing euro-american laws and ideas of justice that is based on punishment.
Impact of the institution: Abuse and neglect in prisons and residential schools. A lot of native people have died because of neglect in american prisons. How both institutions impacted people’s abilities to parent. To give their culture to the next generation.
Agency and resistance – how people use their native identities to survive in prison.

Cleve – idea of total institutions. In the angela davis reading list, one of the main readings she has was about total institutions and examples of that – mental institutions and the military and residential schools. How the idea of the total institution is a european white settler idea. Those institutions don’t exist in that way in other parts of the world – originates with european colonialism and what that means in relation to residential schools. Institution that operates through completely defining the people involved in it and tries to impose completely what its going to do.
Aviva – Goffman. Couldn’t stay in his typology. The idea that people usually work and play and sleep in all these different realms. They have autonomy in different spheres. But in whole institutions it all occurs in the same sphere.
Theresa – some people have argued that prisons are not completely whole institutions because there are connections between the prisoner and the outside world. (TV?)
Maria – design of healing lodges? Who did it and how did it work? Hard to find anything.
Nat – haircutting in prison?
Aviva – history of legal cases where Native people’s tried to sue the government to have their hair the way they wanted. If its a religious reason sometimes people are allowed to keep their hair long – however its mostly up to the guard, or head of the prison.
Nat – what about women’s prisons?
Aviva – in a lot of residential schools native students were given numbers. Half the day would be school/learning to be white etc, the other half the day would be manual labor (to “pay” for the costs of the school).
Cleve – will much of the paper be why this is parallelled in this way?
Aviva – implicit answers because they are both run by white people in order to assimilate native peoples.
Cleve – its a really interesting question of why that would be. If anybody has written what Goffman is saying but in a historical context and this idea of total institutions comes from somewhere in history.
Aviva – both institutions started with colonialism – it was illegal to be Native. Just because you won’t be arrested now for participating in a sundance doesn’t mean that prisons aren’t sites of colonialism.
Nat – by pointing out the parallels between residential schools and prisons – and saying that they are both sites of colonialism – it should lead to a call for abolition
Cleve – prisons coming about in europe as a modern type of thing and dealing with deviance and social control in this modern setting with the prison. Same response with native peoples who don’t fit in with the european viewpoints and using prisons to control them.
Aviva – the fact that native people were here first changes the context in which people are in prison as well.
Nat – native people who go to prison today are probably directly affected by the residential school system and feel those parallels. Prisons exist as a colonial tool.
Aviva – prisons as a way of punishing is very outside of the native cultures before contact with europeans.
Nat – more than just the fact that prisons are used a colonial tool, making the argument that colonialism fueled the growth of prisons.
Cleve – when native people started being disproportionally represented in Canada – is there some sort of cut offpoint in a historical way that would tie the two together; did the population of native people in prisons rise when residential schools closed?
Shayla – article about an aboriginal sex worker who is killed by two white men – how reserves are heavily policed at the borders and the effort to spacially confine native peoples to certain areas and why native peoples started moving to cities was because reserves has such poor housing and not many resources were being provided for them and the encroachment on what little land they had and it connects the policing that was happening on the borders of reservations and how disproportionate the prison population is. When strict spatial borders started breaking down because native people wanted to move into cities more policing started happening in cities?
Aviva – wanted to do a comparative study between reservations and prisons.
Nat – talking about borders as a form of policing, and deportation and the context in north america of borders having been imposed on multiple levels on native land.
Aviva – still trying to figure out how to work in healing lodges, good things.
Cleve – in terms of opposition to those things – residential schools have been shut down now and tey are being widely denounced and apologized for, but prisons still exist and the Harper apology coming at the same time as proposing mandatory minimums.
Shayla – residential schools and colonization are never mentioned in court cases as factors that would bring people to be in certain situations in the first place.
Aviva – in the states, reservations are only under federal jurisdiction – because you’re on a reservation you are committing a federal crime and sentenced to longer in prison.
Cleve – some reserves in canada have native police. Courts, its still the same courts, but police is different. He doesn’t think the federal policy applies in canada.
Maria – foucault does make comparisons between schools and prisons as institutions and ‘panopticism’ being present in schools
Nat – a lot of stuff that could be looked into; people who are in marginalized populations who are targeted by the police force and are also recruited by the police force. Saw some “amazing” program for aboriginal youth to go into army training. Well its okay because the policemen are native (or not-white) as the case may be.
Aviva – proportion of prison guards who are native?
Dan – thinks its pretty typical that people enforcing racist policies will be racialized people in the first place because those are jobs that people don’t want. If you go to the west bank you find palestinians being oppressed by the most oppressed people in isreal – the border police are generally from racialized backgrounds. All of the oppressed people are the ones who are most directly active in oppressing others.
Cleve – “rehabilitation” and residential schools/prisons – where the schools were made to ‘rehabilitate’ people from being native and making them white. As a connection comteptually between the two.
Aviva – ways to talk about that and prison specifically. Aid in prisons – and native peoples not wanting to go because its not culturally relavant to them.
Cleve – (I spaced out for this comment)

Extra – people who haven’t told Nat that they want to go to Recon meeting on Monday in Laval should talk to her. Other option is december 1st. Anyone who has not submitted a clearance form and wants to. Villa maria metro station – Gabbie. At 6pm. Meetings are from 7 til 9. think of questions we want to ask people and stuff. If there are specific things that would be good to ask, that would be helpful. Nat will call her by the end of this week.

*apologies if these minutes are slightly weird. i was a bit minute-d out by that point in the day.

1) go-around

2) Maria Presentation and then discussion

2) Maria’s Presentation:

Prisons as a cite of punishment and discipline:

• Panopticons- cells in ring around outside, guardhouse in middle. Guardhouse can see prisons at any time, but prisoners can’t see into guardhouse.

• Power in a cite not located in any particular person.

• Motivation and particularily don’t matter to the guardhouse stucture.

• Benthan overlooks that certain groups get access to power (guardhouse!) more easily than others. He neglects how oppression fits into this formula!

• Mechanism of panopticism–> infitesimal distribution of power. Control-societies: Deleuze talks about how adaptable control-societies are. CS adapts quicker to resistance, so Maria is saying that they are a better form of domination than discipline-societies.

• Foucault talks about discipline-societies

• Deleuze talks about control-societies.

  * Both societies have inherent power-imbalances within them, which means that oppression exists in both of them.

• Maria wants us to change design-process (of prisons) itself.

• Appadurai article talks about prison in Mumbai.

  → network between collectives

• → daily savings as a

• → politics of patience

Deleuze wants us to “hijack speech”…

• need to change definition of architect to someone who has ability to build their own houses–> politicize definition of architect from perspective of poor person in Mumbai.

• Architects are not expected to be political, or to take political stance on things. Can be called out on this…

• ______ argues for political conception of the argument. Someone who is okay with conflict and wants to create more equality–> more probono work, more understanding of how architecture is involved in oppression in concrete ways. Great group is “Architects Against Prison Design”.

• Catch: architets are either co-opted or just don’t fight political problems in which they are implicated.

Problems with participatory design??

• - Cleve explains petition to stop designing prisons. Can’t have prisoners involved in designing prisons, which obviously would NOT work.

Mega-philosophical question: Who is an architect???

• architects who have degrees need to become politicized?

• Members of communities without arch degrees just need to learn tools for creating buildings. Maria thinks expansion of what architects are could come from degree-holding architects themselves.

  * Tessa suggests maybe we could move further than getting architects to refuse to design prisons. We could try to get building contractors to refuse to sign contracts to build prisons.

  * Vanessa asks how implicated architects actually are in the building of prisons. If architects won’t build, then engineers will. Maria says that this movement would percolate upwards from the architects.

An aside on mandatory minimums:

Judge doesn’t get to decide for how long the offender would go to jail for.

Law and order getting tough on crime, goes along with conservative and neoliberal governments.. cut back on social spending AND get tough on crime. Coincidence?Maybe. We don’t think so.

• 70s and 80s had a lot more participatory architecture.

Resistance: the alliance (3 activist groups in Mumbai) is involved with many meetings happenings in different locations, constant knowledge share with others. So, it’s really hard for this group can’t be quashed.

• nat thinks the group would have to make its communication invisible to the people who were trying to control them.

• Noncommunication? (What is meant by this exactly?)

• → noncommunication through state

• → noncommunication in medium they were supposed to use

*Societies of control ends up being an extension of societies of discipline. Deleuze believes himself to be taking Foucault’s idea further.

Cleve’s question: Could other buildings do what prisons do?

Guantanamo Bey: torture through architecture because they slant the floors upwards and slant the walls to mess with prisoners’ heads. Some architects want prisons to be made completely out of concrete.

→ Discipline implies punishment. Control societies imply continuity– when controlled, you get constant state of punishment.

In Palestine, blasted holes through people’s living rooms. Military actually would do this and just run through people’s homes instead of using alleyways and door. Were completely invisible from a bird’s eye view.

Are there situations in which people should be controlled? Vanessa gives example of a hospital.

• redifining criminality

• ways to deal with criminality– funding social programs, community organizations

  -Foucault and Deleuze say prisons are in a crisis. Are they actually in a crisis, or are they just going underground and in other places where nobody can see them?

]]> http://indyclassfall08.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/minutes-november-7th-2008/feed/ 0 indyclass http://indyclassfall08.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/israeli-defense-force-uses-deleuze/ http://indyclassfall08.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/israeli-defense-force-uses-deleuze/#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:30:49 +0000 indyclass http://indyclass.wordpress.com/?p=266 ]]> scary stuff guys. this was requested after Maria’s presentation on prisons and architecture and Foucault and Deleuze and theory being used for “evil”. check out the link below

http://info.interactivist.net/node/5324

Oct. 20, 2008 IndyClass minutes (these are way late – more recent minutes are found in posts below!)

Art and Representations of Prisons

1. Check-ins. Shayla facilitates!
2. Watched art movie: I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts
3. Discussion of Hunt, “The Disappearing/Re-appearing Prison”

Discussion:

It’s not enough just to create art that shows prisons “more accurately”. Hunt asks: “How, as an artist, can one intervene in such a complex process of representations? It is not nearly enough to show the opposite, simply revealing the concealed and making it visible again…” (p 5)

What does this mean? Show the history of people prior to prisons…?

Participation in art is more political than passive spectatorship (journal of aesthetics and protest).

Did the monotony of the film (I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts) inspire participation or just make it inaccessible?

What changes people’s attitudes about prisons? Study Shayla found: attitudes change more when people engage in conversations, as opposed to watching media.

Prisons Creative Arts Project (California): connecting artists to people in prisons, having exhibitions where former prisoners speak. This seems like an effective model.

Art from within prisons (by prisoners) may be more effective than inaccessible art by non-incarcerated people?

Sociological study: people tend to confuse news entertainment and fictional entertainment on television. News media is made in a way that is more entertaining – fits into crime drama model.

Daily Show – is this a model of “critical media” that has managed to become really popular? Does it encourage criticalness or just everything being funny; i.e. “laughter is the only thing you need to do.” (No action expected – substitute for being actively political.)

But it’s nice to have something funny.

Good art is something that encourages people to find more information about its subject matter.

Photojournalism – well-received in mainstream, but does it “do” anything? Does it do what Hunt says we shouldn’t – just represent visually what’s been concealed?

Maria mentions steps of political action, from parodying, to critiquing institutions, to creating alternative institutions. This is tricky with art – because how does it actually create alternative institutions?

Maybe art as an on-going project (part of an institution-creating project) rather than a final product.

Agenda

1) Check-ins

2) Tessa’s presentation

3) Indyclass project (people interested meet after class)

1)

People are mostly feeling good on a Happy Halloween Friday!

2)

Academic reading by Carleen Faith at SFU

She talks about healing lodges: an alternative to prisons

Only women, or men too? Seems to be only for women…

They’re only for first nations women. Do they need to have status?

Tessa’s questions: why are there more indigenous women in prison? What are their experiences inside, especially in relation to motherhood.

In the 1990 there was a task force with a lot of first nations women making a report on the state of first nations women in prisons.

Federal prisons are for people sentences more than two years, and provincial prisons are for less

Aboriginal women: 1.4% of pop, 23% of women in prison

Public disorder and non-payment of fines were the kind of classist “crimes” that native women were convicted. It is reasons like this why native women are in prison more. Also, they’re more likely to kill abusive husbands, and they’re separated from their land and culture. Native women are racially profiled by police, and reserves are heavily policed. Native women are more likely to receive custodial service (41%) than white (25%).

Life inside prison as life outside: the experience of colonialism of society and government that is not with their values is like prison (lack of control). Experiences of abuse 90% of aboriginal women reported prior abuse when entering prison, whereas it was 60% for non-native women. The experience of residential schools, which were similar to prisons in many ways. After residential schools, many youth were taken to city streets, and then to prison.

Native women have a bond in prison based on a common history that is not that of non-native women.

Healing circles and Native sisterhoods and brotherhoods have formed in prisons (awesome and sad).

In Canadian prisons there is the mother\child program, which is unique to women’s institutions. Allows mother to have access to their child (“little houses” for weekend visits). Geographic distance provides a barrier to access to their children, which is especially the case with healing lodges because there are fewer of them and they’re more dispersed. Women living on reserve are more likely to be reunited with their children because they can stay with extended family on reserve.

In 1997 Corrections Services Canada introduced a bunch of things specifically for aboriginal people in prisons and the criminal justices system (keeping people out of prison) – also an employment strategy.

Not everyone gets into healing lodges. It requires special willingness.

Punishment and healing: a paradox? Native women don’t want to be healed\rehabilitated by the white men who tend to be psychologists. Access to elders and spiritual teachers had been fought for and achieved in recent years.

What happens in the healing lodges? Physically appropriate space for ceremonies and rituals. But other than that, not sure.

3)

Indyclass Project: we’ll brainstorm a step-by-step guide to doing an indyclass at the whale factory (Cleve’s apartment) after class next Friday.