Analyze

Astrophysics is a discipline that has a lot to do with environmental justice, even if it doesn’t look like so. Astrophysics research nowadays involves both large cutting-edge infrastructures and a great number of people and institutions, usually at international level. Most of these projects require to be placed in very specific environments, which are not very common on our planet, to function in the best conditions. The territories chosen to host large facilities for astrophysics, as remote as they can be, are not empty. In most cases, they are inhabited (or regularly frequented) by people who are not always involved in the decision process and may see the construction as an invasion of lands they have owned or occupied for centuries. In this context, we believe that what pulls people away from environmental justice advocacy, especially those who do not live in or near these territories, is the lack of information and awareness about this topic, which may cause strongly polarized opinions and harshful discussions on the topic. To try to fill this gap, as science communicators we decided to develop a game-based activity which fosters the debate about this connection. Among our inspirations is the struggle of the protectors of Mauna a Wākea, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. The mountaintop is a sacred place for Native Hawaiians, who have been fighting to protect their ancestral land from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). There are many other examples of large astronomical infrastructures and their impact on territories, including in our own country (Italy), some more virtuous than others, that show how the Astrophysics research world is strongly connected to environmental justice. For this activity, we chose the Creative Commons PlayDecide format, which aims to facilitate simple, respectful and fact-based group discussions. The game consists of a different set of cards containing facts about the topic, issues for different interest groups and personal stories of fictional individuals who are involved or affected by the topic. By telling the stories of different characters involved in this kind of situation, we aim to enlarge the debate, fostering the change of perspective of players. We wish that many people around the world download and use the game, either during public outreach activities with schools and the general public or as a self-awareness exercise within the astronomical community. The game does not refer to a specific facility, but we researched study cases related to astronomical observatories in sites such as Mauna a Wākea (Hawaiʻi), Kitt Peak and Mount Graham (Arizona), the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy as well as ongoing projects such as the SKA Observatory in South Africa and Australia. In particular, for the story cards, we strived to provide a balance in terms of gender and affected communities, trying as much as we could to avoid stereotypes, in the awareness that we, as the authors of the activity, are a group of white, female astronomers from a G7 country.

Toniolo, Rachele and Claudia Mignone. 2023. "Some students play the PlayDecide activity at a Science Festival in Italy." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

“SAUSD is committed to providing each of its students with a high-quality education, rigorous and advanced programs, and a nurturing, safe environment with state-of-the-art facilities, 21st century learning and technology, and a direct pathway to college upon graduation. Our district proudly boasts one of the highest graduation rates in the state of California.”

Vision Statement

We will work collaboratively and comprehensively with staff, parents, and the community to strengthen a learning environment focused on raising the achievement of all students and preparing them for success in college and career.

Mission Statement

We assure well-rounded learning experiences, which prepare our students for success in college and career. We engage, inspire, and challenge all of our students to become productive citizens, ethical leaders, and positive contributors to our community, country and a global society.

The majority of recent articles (as of February 2022) are about the impact of the Omicron surge on teacher and student absences and instruction. In general, I think it’s hard to tell how a school district is perceived through news coverage–I don’t think they reflect community opinion very well.

Article about the district missing paychecks at the beginning of this school year: https://abc7.com/santa-ana-missing-paychecks-sausd-stalled/11036323/

Potential changes to governance structure, including term limits:

https://voiceofoc.org/2021/10/ocs-second-largest-school-district-moves-to-reshape-voter-representation/

Various unions, including but not limited to:

• Santa Ana Educators Association
• California Teachers Association
• California Federation of Teachers
• Association of California School Administrators
• American FEderation of School Administrators

Community organizations:

• Santa Ana Public Schools Foundation

The annual operating budget for the district is about $710 million, plus $177 million in "other funds." This needs to be double-checked by someone who has a better understanding of budgets than I do--the 2021-22 budget also has a table that says that total expenditures are just over $1 billion.

California state funding makes up 79% of the budget and likely comes with less strings attached than in a more conservative state. California has a complicated Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that makes it harder to separate state/local funding than in many other states--this is another thing I need to do more research on, I currently don't fully understand it. 85% of the district is low-income, so most (if not all) of the schools receive Title 1 funding from the federal government.

Enrollment has declined for the past 18 years and is projected to continue to decline, so funding is declining. COVID-19 has exacerbated the enrollment decline--the district has lost more than 5,000 students in two years. However, this was compensated for by increased federal funding. The last of that funding must be spent by 2024.

The school board is elected, so they are at least somewhat accountable to residents of Santa Ana (although the boundaries of SAUSD are not coterminous with the boundaries of the city of Santa Ana--need to look into how ballots are organized). School board meetings are televised and minutes are posted online, but only in English (45% of students are English language learners and far more than that do not speak English at home).

There are two resolutions posted on the district website stating that they do not assist immigration officials or allow them on SAUSD campuses.

The district emphasizes Family and Community Engagement as a practice, not a program. Part of this is the provision of Wellness Centers, which provide family events, classes on physical/mental health and academic support, and connections to other resources. There are also supposed to be FACE staff at every school, but many of the positions are empty. The website also has a resource newsletter, list of food resources, and a "resource support line" that seems to be available in both English and Spanish.

From the website:

Who is invited to engage with the Wellness Centers?

All families are invited to participate in the Wellness Centers. If you have a child in SAUSD, you are invited. And, if you do not have a child and are a community member, you are invited to participate, too! Remember, it takes a village.

This was representative of a general trend of making school facilities and resources available to all community members, not just students and families.

SAUSD has 5,000 total employees, including but not limited to: teachers, school administrators (principals), school staff (counselors, librarians, nurses, paraprofessionals, janitors, lunch attendants, etc.), and central administrative employees.

The district is led by a superintendent, an executive cabinet made up of deputy/assistant superintendents, and the school board. The district is also subject to some control by the Orange County Board of Education.

There is an assistant superintendent for Facilities and Governmental Relations who is likely one of the most relevant officials for environmental governance. The Facilities and Governmental Relations division is "responsible for the planning, construction, and maintenance of all schools and ancillary facilities within the Santa Ana Unified School District." They're responsible for the condition of school buildings and school grounds, but it's unclear if they have any control over environmental hazards outside of school grounds that affect the school. It's also unclear what the "governmental relations" part of the division does.

Schools are a key organization for environmental justice because they (can/should) provide students with the skills necessary to recognize and challenge environmental injustice when they see it. They can also serve as community hubs, contributing indirectly to environmental justice through the development of community social capital and political capacity.

I first read Gayatri Spivak's, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," many years ago and re-reading it now offers a different context and path to making sense of this work. First, Kim Fortun's contextual introduction is a generative space from which to read this brilliant and complex critique of the Subaltern Studies collective. She provides an opening from which to re-think the place of scholarly engagement within, and as participants of, communities of practices inspired by the research Katie Cox and Angela Okune. Fortun's introduction is a pedagogical gesture, a reflection on her own teaching and learning over time. In re-reading this essay, I can see now that Spivak's essay is also a gesture, opening a place of critique as the grounds for re-imagining and reclaiming the possiblity of Subaltern voices. Spivak highlights the assumptions, the metanarratives, embedded in the collective's historiographical practice as a form of knowledge production.

I have two reflections. First, in reading Spivak's critique of historiography both specific (Guha and Chakrabraty) and more general (Western European) and her analysis of their strategic utility is persuasive. I am reminded of other forms of historiography--specifically microhistory--which also engages in the practice of reading the archive against the grain and which, by avoiding making claims about broader historical patterns and systems, is not subject to Spivak's analysis of historiography. I wonder what microhistorical work emerges from the colonial archive.

My second reflection is more broadly about critique as a generative opening. In the zoom discussion there were moments when contributors began mapping their own encounters with theory (French, German), almost as a rite of passage. I began wondering what other genealogies we bring to our work. This text is a tour de force. It is powerfully incisive. Prerna Srigyan spoke of the multiple meanings of "dangerous" within it. As a strategic text, I find the difficulty in reading Spivak exasperating. As a narrative strategy I think the difficulty is, in part, intentional, which compounds my interpretation. I cannot read Spivak and find affinity, even as I recognize her masterful critique. In a prior discussion Duygu Kasdogan introduced me to the idea of dissenus, as opposed to consensus, as a strategic goal. In reading Spivak as critique, perhaps Spivak is an author willing to position herself not as a guide for collaboration but as a figure of dissenus even as she works to create this generative opening for further work.

         Bringing last week’s conversation on education into contact with this weeks’ discussion of deconstruction and post-colonial theory, I would like to ask the following question: what would it yield if we extended Spivak’s affirmative deconstruction of the subaltern studies group and their participation in historiography to the university and to process of academic publication more generally? In this text, Spivak engages in deconstruction to highlight the subalternists’ own participation in the projects of discursive displacement that they analyze and for successfully failing to incorporate post-structural theory into their method of historiography. Extrapolating from this point, both post-structural and post-colonial theory, too, have been successful as failed-discursive displacements within the university. They have achieved (somewhat paradoxically) some level of hegemony in certain disciplines within the university. However, we learn them, develop them, publish and teach them within an ecology of departments, schools, and institutions that are structured by and that reproduce antithetical values and ethical commitments. This is coming to a head. The neoliberal model of university is in crisis, both from an ideological and logistical standpoint. The question is then not if a discursive displacement will take place within the university’s current sign system, but rather when, how, and what kind of functional change this displacement (however un/successful) will engender.

         The COVID-19 pandemic is implicated in both the logistical and ideological dimensions of this crisis. In short, the logistical crisis posed by quarantine is bringing to light aporias of “the social text” that rendered the university’s existence legitimate and its value legible. Both graduate and undergraduate students alike are being forced to critically reconsider the possibility and expected benefits of their pursuits of higher education. In a complementary if reactionary fashion, the leadership and public representatives of many universities are making the strategically unsound decision to double-down on defending their value in conventional terms. What could be gained by adopting the scholastic ethical commitments of deconstruction, as a first step towards “question[ing] the authority of the [academy] without paralyzing [it], persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility.” (Spivak 1996, 210).

          At another level, I think it is important to consider how the successes and blind spots of the Subalternists might help us to identify our own, as critical scholars of our historical moment. Spivak describes the theoretical contribution of the Subalternists as a theory of change, one that on pivots on/from the force of crisis. Living in the midst of a crisis, it is easy to look backwards from the contemporary and to feel nostalgic for what now seems to be much more endurable and sensible times. However, to do so is to fail to recognize how the germs of our current present were working in those times. Or, in Spivak’s terms, “if the space for a change (necessarily also an addition) had not been there in the prior function of the sign-system, the crisis could not have made the change happen. The change in signification-function supplements the previous function” (1996, 206). Nostalgia is not an escape, no matter how far back you go, the past always leads to this present. Secondly, it is also easy to witness the blunders of the Trump administration or to watch as lockdown protestors arm themselves for open conflict and to essentialize these characters as an origin or source of social problems. But to do so would be to deny the “instituted trace at the origin.” While Trump and lockdown-protestors may not fit the bill of the subaltern, it is important to realize that their “subject effect” has taken shape in and through contrast and conflict with the contemporary left. How can we understand the role of critical scholarship in laying the scene for anti-academic sensibilities of the more radically conservative groups to take hold? They did not take shape in a vacuum but rather as “part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on” (Spivak 1996, 213). In other words, how might we rethink and refashion cultural critique in light of the consequences of our own history of failures at discursive displacement?