These are excerpts from the final report submitted to the UIUC Graduate College in August 2015 detailing the experience of the work undertaken by the Transnational Solidarity Initiative.
1. What were the major goals and objectives of the project? What was accomplished under these goals?
The major goal of this project was to study the networks of solidarity that exist among democratic social movements in the 21st century and how their connections, opinions, and discourses are shaped and limited by social media, as well as how the campus and community of Champaign-Urbana are implicated within these networks of democratic intellectual thought and social practice. To that end, our graduate student-led focal point group had intended to organize events that connected the scholarship and activism of the Champaign-Urbana campus and community to similar kinds of questions being posed elsewhere in the world. This project, which was awarded the first Focal Point Breakthrough Grant, was meant to “encourage creative proposals that run with bold ideas for projects that might seem unconventional, impossible, impractical, or otherwise unviable in today’s terms, but that have transformative potential for the future.” It was also supposed to envision how to “steps to move toward making the “impossible” possible, the “impractical” practical.”
Before our research group could begin to conduct its preliminary work, we were faced by the academic boycott of the University of Illinois following the firing of Professor Steven Salaita from a tenured position at the American Indian Studies program. Like many other units and programs on campus, our initiative felt the impact of the situation directly. Not only did this academic boycott include several signatories who we had sought to invite to campus for talks and conferences proposed in our Breakthrough Grant proposal, thus nullifying much of the potential of the proposal, it also led us to confront the limits of our own work within the university and the community under the constraints placed by a Board of Trustees decision that we, and several other individuals and organizations in Champaign-Urbana, wholly disagreed with.
However, the severity of the intellectual atmosphere and the challenge to constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between departments and across fields led us to look more inward and rework our approach to understanding the meaning of collaboration and solidarity as well as the environment required for “unconventional” research in a public institution of higher education in the U.S. We reshaped our work into an ‘initiative’ and thus re-titled our project the Transnational Solidarity Initiative. Our focus was now directed towards initiating dialogue around perspectives and issues in the contemporary world that were not receiving sufficient attention in the campus and community. We intended to work with the same framework that we had begun with but with a greater emphasis on the role of film as a vector of mediatization in these times as well as a template around which democratic dialogue could be possible. Additionally, we were forced to re-think our intention in the proposal to organize a year-end conference, following which we decided to turn our work during the year into an exhibition instead. We circulated a small questionnaire in the audience during all our events asking for feedback and responses based on their encounter with ideas of "solidarity".
The first event we organized was an experimental pairing of lectures in the memory of the renowned Palestinian-American literary theorist and intellectual Edward W. Said. We screened a lecture that Professor Said gave on imperialism at the University of Washington in 2003, after which Professor Robert Warrior, director of the American Indian Studies program at UIUC, delivered a lecture on the meaning of lost causes in the context of Indigenous thought and Palestinian struggles, especially relevant in the aftermath of the firing of Prof. Salaita. The event was heavily attended and opened up room for conversations around literary nationalism, connections between indigenous struggles, and critical approaches to scholarship.
Our second event was a discussion panel on the ongoing struggle of Kurdish people in Rojava and the autonomous people’s movement to defend the city of Kobane currently from the attacks of the self-styled Islamic State, while remaining within the ambit of a larger independence movement. This was an issue that was deeply misunderstood or barely talked about on campus and the community. The talk brought together Kurdish scholars in the United States in dialogue with people from Rojava, who were Skyped in for the event.
At this point, it became evident that the first two events were primarily attended by members of the UIUC campus because both were held there. For the remaining events we decided to diversify the locations in an attempt to attract more members of the Champaign-Urbana community. Thus our third event was held at the Art Theater in Champaign, where we screened the 2014 documentary film by Göran Hugo Olson, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Defense. The screening was followed by talks given by Professor Teresa Barnes and graduate student Augustus Wood, both from the History department at UIUC. The discussion opened up several questions around the history of Civil Rights and Black Power in the context of the increasingly apparent racial violence in the contemporary United States. The audience, which consisted of local residents, students and faculty, wrestled with questions of decolonization, violence and democracy in the context of African and African-American struggles by using the history of the publication and circulation of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth as a pivot.
From downtown Champaign we moved to downtown Urbana, to the Independent Media Center, where we held the rest of the events for the AY 2014-15: the exhibition Struggle and Solidarity: A Democratic History of Champaign-Urbana and a set of talks. The exhibition featured over 80 displays of archival documents—photographs, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, flyers and posters—that we had been studying during the year. These documents were related to the long history of struggle and solidarity in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the community. The displays covered the local Black Power and Civil Rights movements, the anti- war movement during the Vietnam War years, the Free Speech movement, the anti-Apartheid movement on campus targeting the then South African state, and the anti-Chief movement opposing the use of a racial caricature as a university mascot. We collaborated with undergraduate students, local and university archivists, and many other community members in the course of the planning.
The opening night of the exhibition featured a short screening of a documentary on John Lee Johnson, a leading voice in both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in Champaign-Urbana as well as selections from a film on Champaign-Urbana Days, an annual community gathering of African-Americans in north Champaign. The screening was followed by the testimonies of members of the community who have long been associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have played crucial roles in different struggles in Champaign- Urbana, such as the struggle to end school segregation, the campaign for justice for Project 500 students, the campaigns in solidarity with Central American people’s movements, and the movement against the Iraq invasion. The exhibition and the opening event set off various kinds of dialogues, especially among an older generation of University of Illinois graduates who are residents of Champaign-Urbana and active in contemporary organizations. The narrative arc of democracy and democratic history that we were attempting to draw was discussed at length by people who came to see the exhibition and many chose to give us important feedback on our work. The exhibition remained open for two weeks.
In the same space where the exhibition was held we organized three separate talks and film screenings. The first discussion was led by members of our focal point group and dealt with the history of the fascist saturation bombing of the Basque city of Gernika in 1937 and its afterlives through the circulation of Picasso’s painting Guernica. The discussion was accompanied by a smaller exhibit around the contrast and contradictions between the city and the painting as well as a film screening of a documentary on the bombing in 1937 featuring the testimony of some of the survivors. The discussion opened up several questions about minority nationalisms in Europe, the nature of solidarity between people claiming indigeneity and the role of memory and trauma in the creation of identity. The second discussion expanded the conversation on race and racism beyond the Global North, especially in the United States. We focused on the lives of African students in contemporary India in an event which featured a recently released documentary and a discussion led by an invited speaker working on urban life in India. The discussion opened up several points of connection and analysis between the work of race and racism in urban sites in the United States and others in the Global South. The third discussion brought to the fore the struggle for decolonization in Kashmir amidst the complex intersections of militarization under the Indian state, human rights violations, and struggles for gender justice. We screened a renowned documentary on the realities of life in Kashmir followed by a discussion led by an invited scholar working on the subject. The discussion concerned multiple issues including the difficulties faced by democratic movements and the connections between decolonization movements across the world.
As international students leading a research group, with advisory faculty from across various departments, our work involved collaborating with others to create forums where we could learn more about both the place we were in and the place we were from, thus bringing into dialogue our own locative positions with those of others around us in order to visualize the networks that connect and enable such acts of bridging. In the process of organizing such forums, we came to appreciate how there is a real interest among faculty, students and community members in the intersections between local and global iterations of solidarity and democracy but that it is quite a challenge to bridge the divide between the campus and the community in spatial, political and intellectual terms. Simultaneously struggling and empathising with the academic boycott also helped us understand the ways in which transnational solidarities can be expressed in contemporary digital spheres, but also made us aware of how the local, as a site of analysis, can be differently fulfilling compared to collaborations spread out over larger scales and geographies. One need not always go big in order to do something meaningful - smaller events can bring together exciting interdisciplinary ideas and brilliant minds that may not have had the opportunity to do so. Our engagement with the place-based specificities of Champaign-Urbana also made us more conscious and aware
of the erasures, fissures, frictions and solidarities that mark our lives here.
The major goal of this project was to study the networks of solidarity that exist among democratic social movements in the 21st century and how their connections, opinions, and discourses are shaped and limited by social media, as well as how the campus and community of Champaign-Urbana are implicated within these networks of democratic intellectual thought and social practice. To that end, our graduate student-led focal point group had intended to organize events that connected the scholarship and activism of the Champaign-Urbana campus and community to similar kinds of questions being posed elsewhere in the world. This project, which was awarded the first Focal Point Breakthrough Grant, was meant to “encourage creative proposals that run with bold ideas for projects that might seem unconventional, impossible, impractical, or otherwise unviable in today’s terms, but that have transformative potential for the future.” It was also supposed to envision how to “steps to move toward making the “impossible” possible, the “impractical” practical.”
Before our research group could begin to conduct its preliminary work, we were faced by the academic boycott of the University of Illinois following the firing of Professor Steven Salaita from a tenured position at the American Indian Studies program. Like many other units and programs on campus, our initiative felt the impact of the situation directly. Not only did this academic boycott include several signatories who we had sought to invite to campus for talks and conferences proposed in our Breakthrough Grant proposal, thus nullifying much of the potential of the proposal, it also led us to confront the limits of our own work within the university and the community under the constraints placed by a Board of Trustees decision that we, and several other individuals and organizations in Champaign-Urbana, wholly disagreed with.
However, the severity of the intellectual atmosphere and the challenge to constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between departments and across fields led us to look more inward and rework our approach to understanding the meaning of collaboration and solidarity as well as the environment required for “unconventional” research in a public institution of higher education in the U.S. We reshaped our work into an ‘initiative’ and thus re-titled our project the Transnational Solidarity Initiative. Our focus was now directed towards initiating dialogue around perspectives and issues in the contemporary world that were not receiving sufficient attention in the campus and community. We intended to work with the same framework that we had begun with but with a greater emphasis on the role of film as a vector of mediatization in these times as well as a template around which democratic dialogue could be possible. Additionally, we were forced to re-think our intention in the proposal to organize a year-end conference, following which we decided to turn our work during the year into an exhibition instead. We circulated a small questionnaire in the audience during all our events asking for feedback and responses based on their encounter with ideas of "solidarity".
The first event we organized was an experimental pairing of lectures in the memory of the renowned Palestinian-American literary theorist and intellectual Edward W. Said. We screened a lecture that Professor Said gave on imperialism at the University of Washington in 2003, after which Professor Robert Warrior, director of the American Indian Studies program at UIUC, delivered a lecture on the meaning of lost causes in the context of Indigenous thought and Palestinian struggles, especially relevant in the aftermath of the firing of Prof. Salaita. The event was heavily attended and opened up room for conversations around literary nationalism, connections between indigenous struggles, and critical approaches to scholarship.
Our second event was a discussion panel on the ongoing struggle of Kurdish people in Rojava and the autonomous people’s movement to defend the city of Kobane currently from the attacks of the self-styled Islamic State, while remaining within the ambit of a larger independence movement. This was an issue that was deeply misunderstood or barely talked about on campus and the community. The talk brought together Kurdish scholars in the United States in dialogue with people from Rojava, who were Skyped in for the event.
At this point, it became evident that the first two events were primarily attended by members of the UIUC campus because both were held there. For the remaining events we decided to diversify the locations in an attempt to attract more members of the Champaign-Urbana community. Thus our third event was held at the Art Theater in Champaign, where we screened the 2014 documentary film by Göran Hugo Olson, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from Anti-Imperialistic Defense. The screening was followed by talks given by Professor Teresa Barnes and graduate student Augustus Wood, both from the History department at UIUC. The discussion opened up several questions around the history of Civil Rights and Black Power in the context of the increasingly apparent racial violence in the contemporary United States. The audience, which consisted of local residents, students and faculty, wrestled with questions of decolonization, violence and democracy in the context of African and African-American struggles by using the history of the publication and circulation of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth as a pivot.
From downtown Champaign we moved to downtown Urbana, to the Independent Media Center, where we held the rest of the events for the AY 2014-15: the exhibition Struggle and Solidarity: A Democratic History of Champaign-Urbana and a set of talks. The exhibition featured over 80 displays of archival documents—photographs, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, flyers and posters—that we had been studying during the year. These documents were related to the long history of struggle and solidarity in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the community. The displays covered the local Black Power and Civil Rights movements, the anti- war movement during the Vietnam War years, the Free Speech movement, the anti-Apartheid movement on campus targeting the then South African state, and the anti-Chief movement opposing the use of a racial caricature as a university mascot. We collaborated with undergraduate students, local and university archivists, and many other community members in the course of the planning.
The opening night of the exhibition featured a short screening of a documentary on John Lee Johnson, a leading voice in both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in Champaign-Urbana as well as selections from a film on Champaign-Urbana Days, an annual community gathering of African-Americans in north Champaign. The screening was followed by the testimonies of members of the community who have long been associated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have played crucial roles in different struggles in Champaign- Urbana, such as the struggle to end school segregation, the campaign for justice for Project 500 students, the campaigns in solidarity with Central American people’s movements, and the movement against the Iraq invasion. The exhibition and the opening event set off various kinds of dialogues, especially among an older generation of University of Illinois graduates who are residents of Champaign-Urbana and active in contemporary organizations. The narrative arc of democracy and democratic history that we were attempting to draw was discussed at length by people who came to see the exhibition and many chose to give us important feedback on our work. The exhibition remained open for two weeks.
In the same space where the exhibition was held we organized three separate talks and film screenings. The first discussion was led by members of our focal point group and dealt with the history of the fascist saturation bombing of the Basque city of Gernika in 1937 and its afterlives through the circulation of Picasso’s painting Guernica. The discussion was accompanied by a smaller exhibit around the contrast and contradictions between the city and the painting as well as a film screening of a documentary on the bombing in 1937 featuring the testimony of some of the survivors. The discussion opened up several questions about minority nationalisms in Europe, the nature of solidarity between people claiming indigeneity and the role of memory and trauma in the creation of identity. The second discussion expanded the conversation on race and racism beyond the Global North, especially in the United States. We focused on the lives of African students in contemporary India in an event which featured a recently released documentary and a discussion led by an invited speaker working on urban life in India. The discussion opened up several points of connection and analysis between the work of race and racism in urban sites in the United States and others in the Global South. The third discussion brought to the fore the struggle for decolonization in Kashmir amidst the complex intersections of militarization under the Indian state, human rights violations, and struggles for gender justice. We screened a renowned documentary on the realities of life in Kashmir followed by a discussion led by an invited scholar working on the subject. The discussion concerned multiple issues including the difficulties faced by democratic movements and the connections between decolonization movements across the world.
As international students leading a research group, with advisory faculty from across various departments, our work involved collaborating with others to create forums where we could learn more about both the place we were in and the place we were from, thus bringing into dialogue our own locative positions with those of others around us in order to visualize the networks that connect and enable such acts of bridging. In the process of organizing such forums, we came to appreciate how there is a real interest among faculty, students and community members in the intersections between local and global iterations of solidarity and democracy but that it is quite a challenge to bridge the divide between the campus and the community in spatial, political and intellectual terms. Simultaneously struggling and empathising with the academic boycott also helped us understand the ways in which transnational solidarities can be expressed in contemporary digital spheres, but also made us aware of how the local, as a site of analysis, can be differently fulfilling compared to collaborations spread out over larger scales and geographies. One need not always go big in order to do something meaningful - smaller events can bring together exciting interdisciplinary ideas and brilliant minds that may not have had the opportunity to do so. Our engagement with the place-based specificities of Champaign-Urbana also made us more conscious and aware
of the erasures, fissures, frictions and solidarities that mark our lives here.