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MAY 10 2025

MF post-convo editorial preface: It’s been 105 days – many have bent a knee, a few have resisted – law firms, universities. Harvard is standing strong and Columbia is publicly humiliated and ceaselessly depleted for/harassed/humiliated as the administration extracts endless outrageous concessions, hollowing the soul of the university. There is no end to complicity, rendering anticipatory obedience an act of institutional masochism. 

Activist graduate students, international scholars, doctoral candidates from China and India, undocumented workers, folx with tattoos from Venezuela have been kidnapped, threatened, sent to Louisiana or Delaney Hall in Kearney NJ, Guantanamo or El Salvador. Books have been banned; trans athletes, youth, military denied rights and health care; federal grants slashed; PEPFAR abolished. A judge in Milwaukee and the mayor of Newark have been arrested – for “obstructing justice.”  Claims of “invasion” or “anti-semitism” justify ideologically the brutality. No one believes it.

In our last conversation we warned against “anticipatory obedience” – doing the work of fascists before they even ask. Three months later, indeed, the resistance is on, the work of supporting people on the ground and protesting on the streets/in town halls/on campuses – is alive.  A fascist commitment to spectacle, bloody enactments of white supremacy, Christian nationalism and deeply regressive homo/transphobia foam at the national mouth. Almost 100 white South Africans have been invited into the U.S., deemed “refugees” of a “genocide” (Trump 2025) – when a sweet young graduate from NYU spoke to a massive assembly of parents/family/kin/faculty/students at Radio City, admitted he felt an obligation to speak of the genocide in Gaza, with U.S. tax dollars, and at the moment he is being denied his diploma by NYU.

It’s been a long three months. 

We have gathered again.

EB post-convo editorial preface: Today I learned about the ongoing conversations to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus, in place in the United States since 1701. This is the vital line that guarantees any of us trial post-detention, preventing imprisonment without indefinite delay. Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark – the elected mayor! the U.S. citizen mayor! – was detained by ICE agents a day ago. They are going after the judiciary. The heaviness sits in my body/brain/spirit/soul. It is essential to protect ourselves from this fascist overthrow. To love ourselves. To educate ourselves. It is so overwhelming to our systems that I find many of my friends and colleagues are looking away from the moment as it is happening around them. But authoritarian overtures do not need our attention. They thrive with our unwillingness to hold intellectual and/or emotional space even for the idea of the real pain – let alone for the experience of that real pain of which the idea is always promising.

I’m sitting with the fact that this “part two” writing is not as transgressive as our first one. You asked me aloud in April how can this piece “move the needle of resistance/ re-imagination/supporting and building as we resist”…I feel like the needle moves partially by continuing to speak truth to power at all – itself a doubling down on resistance even if less transgressive than our first gasp. My friends, my colleagues, my collaborators, my comrades. They need this. I need it. Community. Solidarity. This is soul food. We can always say/do more. The resistance is in the saying. I particularly care about how we sustain our nervous systems and our spirits in this crooked body politic. 

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APRIL 17 2025

Michelle Fine (MF): I have some ideas for us.

I mean, I’m happy for us to do this together again. But I also thought it might be interesting to invite friends from around the country – differently situated/vulnerable/enraged – five folks together once a month. Like “Public Bitching, Public Records.” [laughter] You’re at the beach. I’m in the city. I can get a friend at [redacted]. We’ve got [redacted], whoever you’ve got at [redacted]… to get five of us to take temperature once a month. Because right now it feels hard to know where to start… so we’ll talk. You know, it’s hard to know what’s going to play out with Harvard, with Columbia – we’re starting to see pushback there’s… crazy shit going on at CUNY…you know, the [redacted] university system…

EB: I’m still CUNY through and through in terms of my affiliation – I just happen to be teaching remotely, so I’m often chilling by the sea.  

MF: Exactly. All right, we can begin. But I do think it might be compelling (like Farmer’s Almanac?) to schedule something regular – check the temperature for a year. Tracking the predictably unpredictable. 

EB: I think “(un)predictable (un)predictability” is the subtext/subtitle of this piece. 

MF: Sarah McBride – U.S. representative from Delaware – attacked for being trans, keeps reminding us….” I didn’t come to Congress to worry about where I would find a bathroom. Who cares? I will be fine. I just want people to realize that every time they say trans* – with their right hand – watch their left, because they are picking your pocket.” So we have to listen to and fight what they say, but attune with care-ful suspicion to the fleecing behind the scenes. And since we are all affected but/and differently, we are better off gathering a gaggle of us, from around the country, differentially situated to chronicle and build a bold and hilarious resistance and diary of living through/resisting/breathing/holding hands across state and transnational borders.

EB:  Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. I was thinking a bit too…I told a couple of my friends that I was going to talk to you again and… many (but not all) were academics who said “people were starved for that shit” and they’re going to be really happy to see us do it again. But obviously we don’t think we’re the only people who should be talking even though I think there will be some momentum for us like jumping in more. Pass the mic. Widen the conversation. 

MF:  Exactly. 

EB: Can I get your permission to record this on my computer? I’m very, very, very huge on my data privacy. So this will just be saved to the local drive.

MF:  Yeah, yeah. Are you surviving okay?

EB: I’m okay. I mean… You and I will talk about our “okayness” as this conversation carries on because the first question I wrote for you was: “what the actual fuck?”  And then the second question was: “how are you taking care of yourself?” Because I busted my back at the ocean four weeks ago today and it was [redacted] who said to me “It wasn’t the ocean that broke your back. It was fascism that broke your back.”

MF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had some weird headaches, stomachy… so many of us at the Graduate Center – faculty/staff/students – 24/7 we are holding people, ranting… and actually holding people and ranting in the same institutions, not so easy.

EB:  Super hard. Super, super hard. Yeah, holding people 24/7… I have done so much work around global human rights education for so much of my career that I strongly believe that people need to be well-informed. The whole idea that “a well-informed populace is the best defense against tyranny.” I still believe that. And when I worked in global human rights education spaces, I would say to young staff who told me they didn’t want to read the news for their mental health… I would say, “I get that. But then probably you shouldn’t work in this field.”  

MF: Yeah.

EB:  You can’t do global human rights education work if you don’t know what’s going on in the world. You just can’t. And so, it’s interesting because this is probably the first time in my adult life that I’ve had to be more selective with the information I take in – I can’t listen to Democracy Now for an hour at the beginning of every day right now. And I used to do that. What about you?

MF: Yeah, yeah. [long pause] Yeah. It’s so multi-scalar. And I’m engaged/enraged/depressed/looking for radical possibilities  at multiple levels – in the body, with students/colleagues, through our university and union, with Jewish Voice for Peace, with friends/comrades elsewhere (like you!) and with those I love in South Africa, UK, Aotearoa/New Zealand… 

Universities have been hit really hard. It makes me think – just like you said, but in the inverse – the only defense against fascism is educating people. Which is why they’re trying to shut down our schools, ban books, fire teachers, dismiss or intimidate librarians, which is why they have committed scholasticide in Gaza, want to destroy public radio. It’s why they don’t want to educate kids about racial justice, queer lives, a vibrant range of families or reproductive health…. From the perspective of the authoritarians, education must be so dangerous.  Their power must feel so fragile – easily undermined. While you and I – and all of our readers – voice substantial critiques of our institutions and education itself as a reproductive machine – we must appreciate – and right now have to build on the liberatory sparks and spaces within universities and community based/popular education spaces, libraries and encampments – all spaces for radical imagination and learning. We know it, we feel it, and they know it and they fear it. It’s why they want to deny college to people in prison, or to undocumented children. 

The political “right” knows and fears education – it’s why they ban books, want to shut down PBS and NPR, silence students and faculty, monitor our syllabi. I was just reading about what motivates Christopher Rufo, the right-wing ideologue who took over the New College in Florida board, warrior of right wing ideology and educational colonialism. You might think of him as anti-intellectual but he speaks with admiration about Antonio Gramsci. He cites Gramsci for the insight that power and control can be most efficiently and effectively centralized/amassed not through coercion but hegemony. Ideology, fear and throwing red meat to the aggrieved. And so he’s circulating (with substantial monies) right wing/white Christian nationalism through the churches and synagogues, working through the manosphere, social media, podcasts – in English and Spanish – and nourishing a right wing ideology by recruiting working class youth, and youth of color, into police, corrections, military, immigration – building a racist consciousness and massive carceral infrastructure through labor and culture. Dismantle public education and induce right wing consciousness through employment and propaganda in/for the swelling carceral infrastructure. 

EB:  Yeah, terrifying.

MF: I hear how scared my students are… and in their bones they can sense the… predictable unpredictability of it. First they went for pro-Palestine activists.  Interestingly they aren’t arresting the Jewish students – who make up a substantial group of protestors – it would disrupt the narrative of “anti-semitism” the right is trying to promote. At Columbia, Jewish students – friends of Mahmoud – chained themselves to the fences. Very little coverage; Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) also gets sidelined by the mainstream and conservative media.  

EB:  Sure. Yeah, total censorship.

MF: It is strategic and also chaotic; designed to give us politico vertigo. First they publicly kidnapped international graduate students who were involved in pro-Palestine organizing (and/or writing of Op-Eds); then international students with small ‘infractions’ like jaywalking or not using a signal when making a right hand turn or old violations. More recently they have been targeting students in STEM fields from China and India.  So, we are trying to track the pace, geography and bile of HHS spectacle – the unpredictable predictability but it’s messing with our collective nervous system – as you would say, it’s a heist on our collective amygdala. The assault on higher education – on intellectualism, on educators, on ideas, on people of color, on queer folx, on immigrants. Even within the academy – First they went for the humanities, then the social sciences and now the sciences. And the whole thing was just raw anti-intellectualism, anti-knowing, reading, thinking, study, and struggle. It wasn’t really about all those studies that proved “humanities students can still get jobs.” Remember? There were like two years of people doing research to prove that…” That wasn’t their point. 

I have been re-reading Theodor Adorno, on the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.  His writings and speeches from the middle 20th century reminds us that the playbook – centuries old  – carries across generations.  Amass wealth at the top; name a scapegoat and sic the alienated masses on them (read: people of color/queer/immigrant). Circulate images of bloody terrifying spectacles of punishment for those who dare to resist. Offer deals to those who will comply. And then continue to humiliate them. And just keep lying – amass an enormous army of hooded/masked/armed militia fighters, grab a 16 year old, a child with autism, an elder, a mayor and blame them.  I find myself watching the videos on a loop, probing the faces of the police/ICE officers and asking how have we gone so wrong? Did these officers attend CUNY?  It doesn’t take much to notice that they are more “diverse” than we would guess… how do they look their own babies in the face and explain what mommy/daddy/grandpa did all day? Have we invested in a massive machine to destroy their sense of empathy/care/humanity – even against those who come from the same communities?  Is this violence against Others and against Self while the oligarchs count their (crypto) money?

EB:  One thing that I’ve written about before and I was just talking about is this idea – this will be familiar to you… I’ve tried to move away from quoting Deleuze and Guattari a lot in my life anymore, but in the introduction to One Thousand Plateaus, there’s this writing about “ridding traces of fascism from the body politic.” 

MF: Yes. 

EB: And that’s in 1972, you know… so I think about taking that language to the now. And when I talk about the attacks against culturally-sustaining pedagogies or any of these things in schools, it’s so much about what you and I first opened with: resisting anticipatory obedience. But the flip side is… you can feel that U.S. schools are operating under an amygdala hijack. The attack on the nervous system of the body politic is totally language that I have found to help me try to talk with people about what’s going on. 

These days, most of the things that I do for my own well-being (firstly, and then on behalf of everybody) are therapeutic practices. So, whether that’s somatic shaking for stress relief or yin yoga or surf therapy, which I care so much about – all of that fundamentally is about resetting the individual nervous system based on trauma. And all kinds of traumas, right? Racialized trauma, homophobia/transphobia, chauvinist politics –  all these things. 

And then I consider the moment that feels akin to having an abuser-in-chief, and the ways that the manipulative practices of fear-mongering and gaslighting are the practices of abuse against our collective nervous systems. I was on a dissertation defense recently that was about healing-centered writing pedagogies – why young people need it, why teachers need it and all this. And, as you know, “teacher ed” can be a little bit navel gazy. And so, a lot of the questions that were coming up were a little navel gazy. And finally, I was like “I would just like to say that schools in the US are experiencing amygdala hijack and all young people and all teachers need healing-centered writing pedagogies right now.”

MF: Many of us at the Graduate Center are working through questions of higher education’s obligation in the midst of rising fascism, to teach the taboo; to speak the unspeakable; to engage dialogues others fear; to align with those persons/communities/movements most impacted and mobilize resources for the fight. A small example: a collaboration of educators/poets/trade unionists/dissidents/ activists/artists/students/lawyers/journalists co-hosted a gathering at the Graduate Center by/for/alongside pre-K to graduate level “Teachers Under Siege.” To listen/support/build with educators pre K to graduate level, supporting/organizing around trans kids, around Palestine, around migrant families and… We curated a beautiful space where it was vital to connect these struggles that feel disparate that are spilling out of what NYCoRE has called the hydra. Curricular autonomy/culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy/queer sex ed/immigrant sanctuary in schools/trans justice. We learned together in a political education session about the history and current movement of dark money into white women’s organizations like “Moms for Liberty.” I guess now “Moms Against Antisemitism” in the academy. It was a really powerful gathering connecting across schools/levels/communities and struggles. And together something new, across, deep and loving was borne in creativity, a sense of justice, good food and full-heart appreciation for those who feel vulnerable and prefer to mobilize from the rear, as well as those who seek to be publicly engaged in the resistance. 

EB: Yeah. And I know – having been a student of your work when I was a younger faculty member – that you are here for public and participatory methods and all these things. And at the same time, I’ve been thinking a bit about and talking about this balance between obviously supporting our students in their autonomy and decision-making and also – without being paternalizing/maternalizing – having some perspective that sometimes they don’t have about what is and isn’t safe. And so, I had some graduate students, a few of them this semester, that had proposed research with undocumented students in my Research Methods proposal writing class last semester. And so now, this would have been the semester that they would go run that research. And they just can’t. They legitimately… they can’t do that. Not only because they may or may not totally have the skills and preparedness to manage the security of that data once it’s in their hands safely – because the data privacy factor is so real for me – but also there’s danger for them in enacting that research at all. Often, they are themselves undocumented if they’re choosing to do that research at all. So many of them have now pivoted and are writing auto-ethnographies, which is cool and interesting and fine. And also, it’s the backup plan in this instance. They didn’t come to this work saying: I want to do auto-ethnography. It’s like the safer backup choice. And even that feels like a little bit like this is us falling in line. This analysis is not about any singular student’s choice they make. Keep safe.  But this is the gradience of anticipatory obedience. This is us figuring out how we survive. And so, you can’t go run that research right now because we don’t want you to get deported running that research. 

MF: It’s like we’re intellectually self-deporting. 

EB: Phew.  

MF: The epistemic leakage/sabotage/whitening is so important to note – and avoid.  I’ll tell you a story about a collaboratively produced chapter – written by faculty and community college students, all immigrant and many undocumented – and our recent conversations about naming ourselves/outing ourselves as co-authors.  The research collective – myself, a professor at Guttman Community College (Dr. Samuel Finesurrey) and some of his brilliant immigrant community college students – have written a chapter for a British volume on “Urban Violence.”  We decided to collaboratively challenge the dominant lie that immigrants engage in urban violence and document, instead, the layers of state/corporate/intimate violence that immigrants (documented and not) embody and endure; carry in their bodies across borders, oceans and checkpoints.  Eight community college students each authored a section for the chapter, on a distinct aspect of diasporic violence they carry – histories of surveillance, criminalization, living in the shadows, working off the books, embodied violence, being exploited by landlords. 

Blending auto-ethnography with critical analyses of donated oral histories, they each drew from oral histories conducted with immigrant elders in NYC, more than 200, collected by community college students and archived at their university, Voices of Gotham/Shoulders we stand on holds a compelling “counter-canon” of New York City history.  The eight students, and two faculty, met over a weekend last year. And they read through the archives looking for stories of elder immigrants that rhyme with/amplify their own struggles and desires. The oral histories were donated by older folks, from other countries, who migrated at different moments of history. And then the students wrote small pieces on the shards of global violence that live in their bodies, the joys and wisdoms they import to the host country and how living “underground” or “without papers” sustains an entire violent infrastructure of brutal employment, housing and immigration practices.  Our collaborative chapter has been accepted for an edited book in the UK on global landscapes of urban violence, documenting and narrating the structural violence that immigrants carry in their body and bring into the city and the amazing vibrancy that they metabolize amidst the structural violence. 

So, each of these young people chose to write on a dynamic, stitching in oral history materials from five interviews blended in narrative form with their own experiences. To give you a sense: one student, Therno, super smart, is from French-speaking Africa. He’s a food delivery worker – working of course underground. There is a labor movement/union trying to organize the food delivery workers. So, they asked him to organize the French-speaking immigrants. And most of his colleagues politely refused. In response, he wrote a brilliant piece on how the underground economy renders workers/students extremely vulnerable while it protects unethical landlords, unethical employers, unethical healthcare practices. Capitalism/abusive labor practices/unfair housing practices entangle as connected systems that are enriched when workers are kept in the shadows. Each student, in total eight small plates of wisdom sit within the chapter. We’re just publishing this piece teeming with a wide swath of young insights/theorizing. And then recently, since the election, two of the young authors sheepishly told us: “I can’t have my name on the chapter. It’s not just me – my whole family is vulnerable if my name is attached to this experience.” How do we honor the knowledge they have contributed and not render them vulnerable? Is strategic erasure better than anticipatory obedience?  

EB: That is a great question.  And then that little bit of historical distance, right? I played a clip of adrienne maree brown for my students a few nights ago. And a.m.b. was talking about re-locating our relationships with the land and the physical spaces that we’re in despite/in light of these times of struggle that make you feel really alienated and isolated. And then one of my graduating master’s students said: “she’s so right about this moment.” And the thing I had to say was – sadly, this video was made 24 months ago. 

MF: Exactly. Exactly. And yeah. With a collective of activist scholars/artists from South Africa, Taiwan, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Hungary, Canada and the U.S. we’re editing a transnational reader on the obligation of social scientists in times of rising fascism.

EB:  Oh, yeah, you told me that before. That sounds like such a powerful project. 

MF: And we’ve gone back and forth with publishers. We’ve decided to publish Open Access…thinking through the obligation and praxis of critical social scientists in times of rising fascism.  

EB:  And then… the border. I didn’t send this question to you, but I was thinking about it …the question of: what about the border? And obviously that word “border” could mean so many things besides the literal US-Mexico border. Border literacies, border pedagogies, border thinking, border crossing. And for me, I used to leave New York in the worst parts of winter and go surfing in Costa Rica or somewhere to just reset, to come back and keep fighting this fight. And these days, I think I could leave the country but I don’t think I could get back in. And I know you travel. And I’ve been thinking about this because for the first time in my life, when it actually feels so stressful in the body and somatics are so needed and a surf trip in my life would serve me so well right now to keep holding everyone…I feel trapped in the US and I’ve never felt trapped here before. I think I can leave, but I don’t think I would easily get back in. If CBP is stopping random people for random social media and I/we are explicitly publishing like this… 

I mean, and that’s the fear part, right? I don’t know if it’s anticipatory obedience, but for me… because my friends will say “well, just travel with me.” And sure… until the minute that they let you go and they take me aside. It doesn’t actually matter if I’m traveling with you at that point. And for me, it’s the fear of fascist violence, political violence, chauvinist violence. It’s the fear of sexual violence and gender-based violence in general – whether that has anything to do topically with what I’m writing about or what my life’s work is about (which to some extent it is) but even if it wasn’t… That’s the fear that this kind of regime, I think, is bringing and making everybody quiet down. 

MF: I work with a group called “Proud Educator Networks”. You know, they’re amazing and now documenting their work; the impact of being “out” fully as an educator, with all sides of self – gender, language, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, disabilities – known; they are planning a Queer Educator camp for a national collective of educators, especially from states where you “can’t say gay.” The Proud Educators Network includes educators who out (more and less!) – mostly of color but not only – teachers and administrators in the New York schools. They’ve been gathering and I’ve been hanging for years. As queer history sees an enormous threat and push to return to the closet, they are absolutely committed to organizing/educating/being solidarities and documenting the power of educators expressing their “full selves” in schools and classrooms.  Just an example of the amazing work of these educators: [redacted] is a Latinx gay principal of an elementary school in Queens. Years ago, his faculty and students were creating collages of famous gay people. The kids were making posters for the main hallway, and curiously they left the middle empty. And X said to the kids: what goes in the middle? And they said, you do! Of course, he thought he wasn’t out to his students. And now, for his dissertation, he’s documenting the rich/brutal/bold history of out queer academics as well as the contemporary academic, emotional, intellectual, and political and ethical benefits of having teachers be their full selves in the school. 

Another participant of Proud Educators Network was a fifth grade teacher. He said to the class “I’m going to show you something.” He was teaching in a public school with administrators who were very religious… not cool. So, he put his Powerpoint up, but next to it was a folder that said “engagement photos.” And the kids are like: “we’re not watching your presentation until you show us that!” And he said, all right, there are going to be some surprises. So, it’s him and his equally gorgeous Haitian fiancé, now husband. And the kids said “oh that’s so cute.” And one kid was like “That’s fucked up. That’s really sick.” And like two days later, that kid came back in class and said “All right, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s all right. But if you have a kid can you name them after me?” So, with PEN (Proud Educators Network) we are tracking the stories of what happens in classrooms – like even in New York City you’re legally protected, obviously, but not protected to be out.

EB:  Totally. It brings me back to all of this somatic and therapeutic research and the benefits of getting to be your authentic self in every space – and also the harm and lack of belonging that occurs when you aren’t able to. And for many of us who grew up under the neoliberal regime producing interlocking structural oppressions and violences in forms of homophobia, sexism, racism, whatever they are… we become accustomed to the fact that you may or may not want to be your authentic self. It may feel easier for you not to be. And so now, four decades into my own life and journey, I am really reading about the negative subjective well-being implications of not experiencing belonging in different spaces in life… 

So, trying to stay grounded in all of this… I feel like it is the work I must do to sustain this long struggle to justice. You know, I was thinking – knowing that I was going to talk to you – we’re only three months into this madness, you know? I’m thinking so much about the long game right now because I had to consider – oh, maybe I can’t leave the country. Or not get back in. I was like, shit, I guess I’m going have to [redacted] instead… My frames of reference are being completely changed. Even if the current regime play by the rules and are somehow out of office at the end of this, it’s not for three and a half years! That’s a long time from now.

MF: Last week there was a gorgeous Liberation Seder held at Foley Square, in front of the ICE building. Mahmoud’s lawyer is also Ruymesa’s lawyer. He explained to us that apparently when they grabbed her off the street in Somerville, Mass, they pulled her in the van, they ripped off her hijab.

EB:  I read that. 

MF:  And one of the ICE agents, masked and without uniform, told her “I know you think we’re monsters, but we’re just doing what we’re told.” Shouts of “SHAME” echoed across lower Manhattan. Hundreds of police were amassed across the street. The evening was stunning… a moment of public refusal and joy; solidarity and reclamation of public space for Palestine justice.  I find myself compelled these days to think with others toward creative moves of resistance and imagination; how do we interrupt the now predictable cycle of protest/repression/support/protest/more cops/more broken bones and spirits/depleted institutions. How do we chronicle the magical work that critical educators and activists are doing, and how do we build even as we are engaged in fierce and riotous resistance?

We are – 100 days in – not just resisting but we are reinventing/building the lives we want to live; sculpting alternative lives in fragile solidarities, mutual aid, attuned to care and justice.  I’ll give you an example of the kind of “turn” I am loving these days.  I’m teaching a graduate course with students from CUNY/ New York and students from Moondani Balluk Institute (an Indigenous research unit in Melbourne, Australia).  One of our students – [redacted], brilliant from Brazil, is doing his master’s thesis on the queer diaspora in Portugal from Brazil – you know when Bolsonaro showed up –  many left. And he said, you know, “we’re marginal, we don’t all feel like we belong.” And a student from Australia piped up to reframe the margin-center binary: “There’s another way to look at this… I’m queer from Chile. I live in Australia. I think of us as floating kelp. Like we just show up on these shores and we take new forms; we change everything and we let people breathe.” 

We need those radical re-imaginations now, what my friend Maxine Greene – long gone – would call aesthetic awakenings in movement spaces/schools/art, rather than anaesthetic numbing.

EB:  That sounds right. It’s like – what’s the book? Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It makes me think about all my surf therapy research. When I think about what I want to do right now… people will say to me: how are you doing so much? You’re doing too much… And for sure, maybe I was doing too much and then the ocean and fascism broke my back and I had to pull back. And it has forced me to recalibrate. And so now when people ask: well, what do you want to do? Well, I like this conversation with you – this kind of work feels valuable to me, this scholar-activist work in many possible directions. And I like the day-to-day work in do on the ground in community with organizers and students.  

I have a book (it would be #4) I’m supposed to be writing that’s sitting right here in front of me on my desk titled Disrupting Data: Youth Activism and Anti-Surveillance Storytelling. It is an extension of the work I first published more than a decade ago with youth activists, looking deeper into data privacy and surveillance capitalism as we critical educators continue to support youth in their human rights work. And it’s super important content. But I don’t have the attention span right now for it. So, I’m trying to honor in myself what’s actually needed. Whether it’s physical healing or if it’s the nervous system. 

For me, the surf therapy research is a space where I want to spend my free time. So, I do that. I volunteer to run the global research of 160 organizations across six continents. And what’s fascinating about it is that the surf therapy programs that are running are run by lots of different kinds of people demographically for lots of different kinds of demographics around the world. And so, you can slice it in a million different ways and there’s this one program called [redacted] in the UK that’s run by two women. And one of them is definitely out, loudly queer. And they are taking immigrants who experienced water-based trauma during migration, and they are bringing them back to the water to “reclaim the sea.” And it’s so powerful because we know some of the people that are reclaiming the sea with them have been raised to believe that homosexuality is a sin. And so… just the ways that these therapeutic spaces that we find are actually healing us despite or in light of the madness is powerful. 

MF: So beautiful.  

EB:  Before we go, because we could obviously do this forever – a few things are standing out to me. One is… you know, there was so much interest when we had our first dialogue and then we launched the archive.  

MF: Yes! 

EB: I went in and I looked at the CryptPad that we set up for submissions because we can’t trust other platforms like Google. And I went in and I checked the Proton email account and there’s like a half dozen things. There’s not a whole lot but so… what I’m hoping to do after this call, is pull those things down and make sure they’re scrubbed of anything that even slightly could ever be conceived of as identifying and get them in a position that they can go up online. And then extend the call again because when I look at the dates and timestamps over the last few months…a faculty member who you know and with whom you share an affiliation – who has so much safety and security in his identities, sent something in February. And then somebody from an institution that I don’t believe either of us are connected to sent two things in March. And then somebody just sent a poem before this and so this slow trickle is interesting to me. 

MF: I thought to myself – if we did our first conversation now, would I or you have said what we said? I’m glad we did. It enabled other people to breathe. But it is a different moment. Now, when I’m sitting with students who are shivering; the need to support/resist/re-imagine/provoke and build. Lots of verbs.

EB:  Absolutely. Even some of the people you’re talking about, like as we’re having this conversation, like you’re saying their names, but they won’t end up in what we print.

MF: No, no. And I have more respect for the Harriet Tubman strategy than I did before. You know what I mean? Like before I was like, we all have to, you know, I’m white, you’re white. We’re old, we’re…and then a Black friend at the University offered: I’m going to do that Harriet Tubman thing, all right? Columbia bent over and he’s going to keep slapping. Sorry…  

EB:  Totally. I mean, that’s the cycle of abuse though, because some fraction of the body politic, some acquiescing bourgeoisie, keep going back for more. The more these institutions agree to move how any dictatorial dictum states, the more this crazy shit goes down because of that manipulative dynamic. 

MF: It’s interesting. A friend was fired from the FDA; an international student who believes they should leave the country because of political speech, and yesterday Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark and gubernatorial candidate for NJ, was arrested as he protested a private detention hall. All three, separately, used the words “I felt humiliated.”  That’s a deep word, and shocking from three bold warriors of justice; the word cuts through the belly.  This is what state sponsored (and intimate) sadists/abusers create – a sense of humiliation.

I think even yesterday there was a clip about the high-end law firms that caved and they were like, we’ll do pro bono work for instance helping veterans. But Trump and friends are deploying the “pro bono” lawyers to right-wing causes: the anti-abortion litigation; fracking; immigration law. The more they comply the more he humiliates them.

The grounds are shifting quickly – we are all watching the strategic maneuvers now that the field of fascism is forming. That’s why I would love either to have a conversation with you and five-ish folks at public-ish universities to kind of take the temperature both on the ground and in the institutions. To track, archive and organize across institutions and communities. [laughter] 

EB:  Yes. And sustain it. I like that idea. I like the idea of a monthly sustained check-in dialogue because even like, you know, [redacted] hooked it up and got me a scholar-in-residence position this year, so there’s further opportunity there. And I have friends at [redacted] – because I’m going to teach a class there on “Scholar-Activist Praxis” now in the fall, which is going to be awesome – but somebody said to me “well, then you won’t have to teach at Columbia anymore.” And in some worlds, there are still some like well-meaning white people I know who are like, “that’s amazing that you teach at Columbia.” Like, you know, like the Ivy League shininess does not go away. And also, I’m like, yeah, get me out. Whatever that was meant to be or serve or do – it is over. 

MF: It is over. When I left Penn after teaching there for more than decade, to take a position at the Graduate Center, CUNY, people were like “You’re going the wrong direction – you are supposed to move upward from public to private/elite. You’re counter-commuting.”  They are, and were, so wrong. As much as CUNY is an ongoing struggle, it is a project worth fighting for – When Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara taught at CUNY (in the SEEK program at John Jay), they jotted notes and letters that can be found at Lost and Found archives, about CUNY as a prison, as a liberation space, as a site of counter currents. And indeed more than 50 years later, it still is.  Faculty/staff/students are deep in the struggle, understanding and committing to public higher education – in our classrooms, dissertations, protests, encampments, zines, CUNY-based movements for justice, in our labor union – as a not-yet/always bending toward anti-racist, decolonial, transgressive project… even or especially when CUNY breaks our hearts.

EB: I actually had a conversation recently… I can leave it here with you and then we can strategize next steps when we stop recording…but I was at a random community event and a friend introduced me to a random person and somebody rolled up and was like “hey, don’t you teach on the faculty at the [redacted]?” And – it was social and I was in party mode [laughter] and I was not ready for that conversation. So…I mean, I’m always pretty unfiltered, but I was particularly unfiltered that day and she was telling me she was going on sabbatical and kind of lamenting the “golden handcuffs” of the whole thing.  

MF: Yeah. Yes.

EB: And she asked “what are you writing about”? And I said, “I mostly do research on surf therapy these days.” And she, you know, asked what does that have to do with education, blah, blah, blah. And I said, “you know the university doesn’t really care about me and I don’t really care about it.” Truly. Even though I love teaching. University’s cool, whatever, but being disentangled from the narratives of some of this stuff. Like promotion and tenure and I don’t have a relationship. And there’s a freedom in that.

MF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Years ago I participated in a participatory action research (PAR) project with a human rights lawyer and close to two dozen educational rights activist youth from all over the world. We all gathered to craft our transnational inquiry in a gorgeous loft in Dumbo/Brooklyn. The young people were youth who represented “low status communities” within highly unequal places, for instance, Afro-Colombians and Dalit from India. Trying to document global inequities in educational access, and motivated by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, our task was to design a large scale transnational survey about access to education. Our first session we were trying to figure out how we might “systematically” calculate racialized/gendered obstacles to education in these very different geo-political contexts.  To open, we plainly asked: “what are the obstacles to getting education in all your countries, money and travel and blah?” And one of the Dalit young women from India raised her hand with a complex inquiry: “How do we define discrimination? For instance, because of the caste system many of our fathers are treated badly so they drink a lot and may beat our mothers. Daughters have to stay home to take care of the mothers so we can’t go to school. Is that discrimination?” And at the same time that I said “yes” the lawyer said, “no, that’s not.” [laughter] But indeed that is how “discrimination” rains into the family kitchen. That’s how it takes form. 

Long story short, we conducted these systematic, youth-created surveys in a broad range of languages across nations, focused on those most marginalized in these 12 countries. We came back six months later, with all our data, and we were preparing for the youth to present the report to an International Commission on Education in Geneva. And this young man from Cameroon, who told us that he walked four miles to school, which was a tree in the field with a guy and a book, a brilliant student and he explained to us: “You know, with all due respect, I don’t believe in Geneva and Geneva doesn’t believe in me. I’m so tired of being the poster child. But what I love is this work. I love talking to people from the Dominican Republic and Honduras and Thailand and the Philippines and Jamaica and South Africa about how we struggle in our community.”

This was an important lesson about horizontal organizing and solidarity praxis, rather than documenting inequities to try to convince elite authorities that injustice hurts. It was just so interesting. Once you let go of the vertical, and attend to the horizontal, a radical solidarity and re-imagination can form.

EB: Totally. Yeah, you just changed the game.  

MF: You change the game. 

EB: That’s the work right now, too. Change the game, try not to end up at Gitmo and change the game. Those are the things I’m trying to do. I keep saying, I feel like the most radical thing I can do as a New York City educator is to be living some sort of nomadology, epistemological van life. When people ask me, where am I, I tend to ask: “where are you”? There are very few people who I will answer that question for, you know? This is a surveillance question. I’m here. I’m present. I’m with you. Let’s go. 

MF: The most radical thing I keep offering to do is throwing my white woman body in front of you, no matter who’s coming. I will tumble for justice.

EB: I love it. I could picture it. Almost like a “Bread and Puppet” show. The theater of all this. Like Brecht.

MF:  Yeah, there she goes! 

EB: Right. Yes. It’s like “Michelle Fine tumbling for justice in front of you!” [laughter] I love that. Get somebody to do visuals for that. Well, thank you for doing Part Two with me. I’m going to go work on the POARS archive.