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Fieldnote_Apr 19 2023_Naluwan_Sherily

This week's communication was very diverse. Originally, we were supposed to scan photos, but our group of grandmas forgot to bring them, so we spent the entire conversation.

Fieldnote_Mar 29 2023 _ Naluwan_Sherily

We spent this week's class with the older generation of Cultural Health Station. As soon as we entered the classroom, we danced and exercised with the elderly.

Fieldnote Apr 9 2023 - 9:59am

這週的課，我們是和老一輩文化衛生站一起度過的。一進教室，我們就和老人一起跳舞、鍛煉身體。之後，我們按照小組名單與我們的部落家庭會面。今天，我們主要會見了家裡開雜貨店的溫奶奶。在開始與部落居民互動之前，Scott 分享了他之前與土著朋友錄製的幾段傳統音樂錄音，並提醒我們與部落成員聊聊音樂相關的內容。

Elena Sobrino: anti-carceral anthropocenics

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Why is the rate of incarceration in Louisiana so high? How do we critique the way prisons are part of infrastructural solutions to anthropocenic instabilities? As Angela Davis writes, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” One way of imagining and building a vision of an anti-carceral future is practiced in the Solitary Gardens project here in New Orleans: 

The Solitary Gardens are constructed from the byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo- the largest chattel slave crops- which we grow on-site, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the United States. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, contemplative practices, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between persons subjected to solitary confinement and volunteer proxies on the “outside.” The beds are “gardened” by prisoners, known as Solitary Gardeners, through written exchanges, growing calendars and design templates. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.

"Nature" here is constructed in a very particularistic way: as a redemptive force to harness in opposition to the wider oppressive system the architecture of a solitary confinement cell is a part of. It takes a lot of intellectual and political work to construct a counter-hegemonic nature, in other words. Gardeners in this setting strive toward a cultivation of relations antithetical to the isolationist, anti-collective sociality prisons (and in general, a society in which prisons are a permanent feature of crisis resolution) foster.