{"id":844,"date":"2018-01-02T18:55:26","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T18:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/?page_id=844"},"modified":"2018-01-04T16:32:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T16:32:52","slug":"alicia-garza-situated-analysis-and-practicing-being-free","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/alicia-garza-situated-analysis-and-practicing-being-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Alicia Garza: Situated Analysis and Practicing Being Free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Abigail Jones<\/strong><br \/>\n<!--\n\n<h4>Faculty Intro:<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n<p>\n\"Maren Stunes\u2019 research paper, completed in Fall 2016 in ES 375, Environmental Justice, demonstrates a critical analysis of the Baltimore City Public Works Department and its decision to shut off water to citizens with outstanding bills. She utilizes a procedural justice lens to critically examine the structural inefficiencies in city government. Baltimore City represents a fascinating case study in this context due to its unique political structure and recent, controversial decisions to shut-off water to its most vulnerable communities. Stunes argues that there is a lack of opportunity for citizens to participate in those decisions that affect their everyday lives and livelihoods. Drawing on literature grounded in water rights, Stunes demonstrates that water has particular significance as a human right. The paper offers a new lens through which to understand structural decision-making processes in city government in Baltimore, highlighting the way in which the most marginal populations continue to be made irrelevant, a process that carries greater weight when analyzed in the context of access to and distribution of water.\"\n<\/p>\n\n--><\/p>\n<h4>From the Author:<\/h4>\n<p>&#8220;This paper explores the tension between remaining situated in the context of the current socio-political moment and looking ahead to how the world could be different when practicing activism or working towards social justice. I assert that any action or theory cannot make meaningful change unless it holds space for what is and what could be simultaneously, and use Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza as a case study. My analysis of Garza&#8217;s work is anchored in Toni Morrison&#8217;s essay entitled &#8220;Home,&#8221; in which she explores how one can be both &#8220;free and situated&#8221; within our white supremacist world.<\/p>\n<p>\nI wrote this piece as part of the Peace Studies course &#8220;Rewriting Race,&#8221; taught by Prof. Ailish Hopper. Each of us was charged with selecting and analyzing a person who we felt re-wrote race, as a culmination of our work engaging with numerous and diverse race theories throughout the semester. I was inspired to focus on Alicia Garza after attending her talk at Goucher in the spring of 2016; she was both grounded and hopeful in a way that I had not encountered in other social justice advocates. She ended her talk with a charge that I found particularly compelling: &#8220;If you believed that freedom was possible in our lifetime, what would you do? How would you do it? Who would you do it with? And then I beg you, to do it.&#8221; This encapsulates the paper&#8217;s focus of being both &#8220;free and situated&#8221; and challenges the listener or reader to have the strength to believe in justice in an unjust world, a strength which I assert is necessary to creating meaningful change.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/files\/2018\/01\/Abagail-Jones-PCE006.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Alicia Garza: Situated Analysis and Practicing Being Free<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Abigail Jones From the Author: &#8220;This paper explores the tension between remaining situated in the context of the current socio-political moment and looking ahead to how the world could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-844","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":847,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/844\/revisions\/847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}