Interview Archives - Social Science Matrix

Gendered Violence in Insurgencies: Interview with Tara Chandra

Published December 16, 2024

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Tara Chandra, a consultant and independent researcher who received a PhD in Political Science with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC Berkeley.

Chandra’s research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. Prior to beginning her PhD, she worked in foreign policy in Washington, D.C. She holds a Master’s degree in Global Affairs from Yale and a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Social Science Matrix, and focused on Chandra’s work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. [Note that the interview was conducted while Chandra was still a PhD candidate.]

Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

[JULIA SIZEK] Hello and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Julia Sizek. And today, we’re speaking with Tara Chandra, who is a PhD candidate in political science at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and international security. And today, we’ll be speaking about her work on gendered violence in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Thanks for coming.

[TARA CHANDRA] Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

[SIZEK] So let’s get started with sort of the big question, which is, where does violence against women fit into the larger battle between insurgents and counterinsurgents?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, that’s a great question. My research looks more at the changes that happen in targeting of women during counterinsurgency operations. And I actually find that counterinsurgents’ behavior and presence can increase incentives for insurgents to target women.

So contrary to kind of what’s out there, a lot of folks will say, oh, violence against women is an inevitable part of conflict. There’s existing research that shows in particular that sexual violence is not something that is inevitable in war. That — there’s a great article by Elizabeth Wood, “Rape in War is Not Inevitable.”

And I kind of build on this considering other forms of violence against women, kind of expanding on the literature that has focused largely on sexual violence. And I find that there are changes both within conflicts over time — actors of the same ideological persuasion will decide to allocate resources towards targeting women at certain points in conflict, and less allocation happens towards those kinds of attacks at other points in conflict — and then also between conflicts where the actors are kind of the same ideological persuasion.

You see a lot of difference in both the kind of investment in the intensity of violence against women but also the kind of form that that violence takes. And so my research kind of investigates why that is. And then I find that it is largely dependent on the actor who is performing the counterinsurgency that can actually change the incentives for insurgents to behave in particular ways.

And just to give you a really quick example, I guess a couple of examples I can point to, we think of Boko Haram, for example, as a group that really targets schoolgirls in particular, right? In 2014, they abducted about 270 schoolgirls from a town in Northeastern Nigeria called Chibok.

And this was the really infamous– if you were kind of around, politically active or on Twitter in 2014, you would have seen Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai started the– participated in, I don’t know who started it, but participated in the #BringBackOurGirlsCampaign.

And so this idea that these girls– this was a group that goes around abducting schoolgirls. And a lot of people thought that this was a really natural behavior for the group to do, particularly because the group’s name, when translated loosely, means “Western education is forbidden.”

And so a lot of people thought, well, this is natural. This group doesn’t want girls to go to school. They’re targeting schoolgirls. But actually, if you look at just a couple of years prior to the Chibok abduction, only about half a percent of the attacks that the group perpetrated took the form of abduction.

And by 2014, when they did the Chibok abduction, that number had risen to almost 14 percent. So that kind of variation between different points of a conflict is what my research really focuses on.

And I find that what happened between 2012 and 2014 was that the Nigerian government really started to perpetrate a much stronger counterinsurgency mission, and that that changed the incentives on the ground and the strategic dynamics that the group was facing. And so they really had to change their resource allocation towards different types of attacks. And that was one of the things that they tried and actually managed to then undermine — the Nigerian government extracted quite significant concessions from them.

So that’s like a sort of a motivating example. Another case that I look at is Somalia, and I look at Al-Shabab. And that’s a group that also is sort of considered to be a group that really targets women. And they were incredibly repressive in the years prior to the African Union mission in Somalia.

AMISOM came in and did a lot of counterinsurgency to deal with Al-Shabab. And prior to AMISOM being really ramped up and doing kind of much more robust counterinsurgency, they were– the group was very repressive towards women.

There really particularly stories of how they would– women couldn’t leave the house without wearing an abaya, which is a particular kind of covering. But they were not they would not perpetrate sexual violence against women.

But once AMISOM came in and started to really challenge the group on the ground, it changed the dynamics for the group. And it really– actually, you could see the change in their behavior because then after there was a much more robust counterinsurgency, that’s when they started to do a lot more sexual violence.

So these kinds of things like why do these changes happen in the middle of conflict is kind of what my research focuses on. And that’s the– bringing in the relationship to counterinsurgency, I think is the kind of new piece of it that I’m bringing.

[SIZEK] Yeah. So this raises a question about sort of the nature of the dynamic between insurgency and counterinsurgency and how this has changed over time. You mentioned that Boko Haram changed their strategy from not doing these abductions to doing abductions.

So how have these theories of counterinsurgency and insurgency changed over time? And where does your research sort of fit into these understandings of counterinsurgency?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, I think– well, it’s interesting because I think one of the advantages of being the insurgent group is that you kind of can throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And so counterinsurgents, because they are national militaries or they’re representing international coalitions, they’re required to, in theory, abide by the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.

And so they’re limited in what they can do. And also, just training an entire military operation is much more regimented and disciplined than being an insurgent, where they obviously do planning, but their training is much less disciplined than kind of what a national military would do.

And then thinking about even a doctrine for a military that’s as big as the US operation in Iraq. I mean, that requires a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, and then really shuffling down all the way to the operational– from the operational to the strategic to the tactical on the ground, what people are doing day-to-day requires a lot of training and a lot of discipline. And there’s a lot of work that goes into that.

So changing that last minute in response to what insurgents are doing can be quite tricky. And so that is why you kind of get this dynamic where you have counterinsurgents who are militarily much stronger than the insurgents just almost all the time.

That’s just kind of the nature of doing counterinsurgency. But oftentimes, insurgents have particular other advantages. And one of the advantages they have is that they can be much more nimble, and they learn and adapt much quicker than the counterinsurgents do.

They learn very quickly. And this is kind of part of what my research finds is they learn very quickly what the weak spots are for the counterinsurgent.

And so my research finds that, for certain types of counter insurgents, in particular, I find that counterinsurgents who are domestic actors — meaning like national militaries doing counterinsurgency in their own borders — they are much more susceptible to being undermined by insurgents based on gender-based violence.

So I think that there’s kind of like– I wouldn’t necessarily– I don’t know if insurgents have a theory of insurgency that they’re necessarily adhering to. I think they have a lot of advantages that they avail themselves of.

There’s a great quote in the field manual, the counterinsurgency field manual, which is what the US government uses now, I think, as it’s sort of like theory of counterinsurgency, which is insurgents succeed by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere. The government, or the counterinsurgent, fails unless it maintains a degree of order everywhere, right? So the bars of success for insurgents and counterinsurgents are also wildly different. So I think insurgencies are interesting from that perspective.

But in terms of changes of theories of counterinsurgency, there’s actually been a lot of development on that front. And what’s so interesting about studying this time period is that the development of the kind of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine occurred during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So it’s pretty recent.

And one of the really interesting findings for me was talking to interview subjects who were in Iraq in the very first wave of the invasion, so people were there in like 2003, 2004, and asking them kind of, what was your training, what was your experience?

And it was wildly different and much sort of– much less developed and much less robust than folks who served in the surge, which started in 2007. But if you talk to people who served in like 2009, they just had much more training, much more emphasis on culture, understanding the culture, understanding kind of social norms.

So I think, you know, the US government learned and developed that theory better over time, but it did take a while. And so this was kind of the, you know, the, like, winning hearts and minds theory, which is the broader overarching idea, is that you only win in insurgency–

–against an insurgency if you are winning hearts and minds of the local population, because you can’t succeed without the support and cooperation of the local population. And so this was the idea that you really need to– you can’t do it coercively. And so that really was developed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[SIZEK] So this brings us back to women as perhaps, famously, women who are in these villages while the men are out doing insurgency activities, become a really important player in this battle between the insurgents and counterinsurgents.

So what is valuable for insurgents to target women specifically? And what are the sort of mechanisms that you have identified in your work as to why they would want to do that?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, so the theory that I propose has two parts. The first is that the actor who is conducting the counterinsurgency matters a lot. And I will just briefly outline why I argue this and why I find support for this, because in Nigeria against Boko Haram, it was very clear that the Nigerian people had a clear expectation that their government should not only protect its own citizens from these kinds of attacks, but that once they happened, they should be able to retrieve the citizens.

So the fact that the Chibok schoolgirls, it took so long for them to be returned — and not all of them were returned — was a real challenge for the government politically because people had– its own citizens had this expectation, and the metric of success that they were using in determining whether they would continue to support the government’s operations, was– like, were they– did these– one of the key metrics was, are they going to get these girls back?

And on the other hand, if you look at something like the war in Iraq, there’s a lot of evidence that Americans had a very high awareness — this was something that I found just in polling data from the kind of mid 2000s — that Americans had a very high awareness of how many American soldiers had died in the Iraq War, but really low awareness of how many Iraqi civilians had died.

So it was very clear that the metric of success that the US government was using to continue to gather support from its own electorate was how many service members are dying in Iraq, not how many Iraqi civilians are dying.

So what I said earlier is that insurgents are very good at learning the weak spots of the government. And so I think — it became very clear in Nigeria that abducting schoolgirls and violence against women and girls was really a core tool to undermine the counterinsurgent.

On the other hand, in Iraq, it was clear that violence against civilians or violence against women wasn’t moving the needle so much for the US government as was violence against American service members.

And so in Iraq, instead of allocating resources to violence against women and girls, what you found was that Al-Qaida was more allocating resources to developing better IED, which are improvised explosive devices technology, that would— those are the things that you would see blow up on the side of the road and then American, like, armored personnel carriers or tanks would just blow up. And so they invested in developing more of that technology because that was the sort of weakness, as it were, of the US government.

So that’s kind of the first part of the theory, that these insurgents begin to understand that for different types of counterinsurgent actors, the incentives are different. And then I think if gender is going to be a salient means of undermining the counterinsurgent, it will then happen through, I argue, these three mechanisms.

And the three mechanisms are, first, what I call information transmission suppression. And this kind of relies on the idea that, when you’re the counterinsurgent, you show up to a place, and you don’t know who the insurgents are. Everyone looks the same to you.

And this is true even in a place where— even in a domestic counterinsurgency. If you’re the Nigerian military, you largely come from the south, you’re now operating in the north. The norms are different. You don’t know the local kind of— sort of populations’, like, social structures.

You don’t know who’s in charge, who’s who. And this is what political scientists call the identification problem, which is show up, and you don’t know who the counterinsurgent– or who the insurgents are. And you need to get information on who the insurgents are from the local population.

And that, I argue, is a really important— that kind of information sharing between civilians and counterinsurgents is a really important part of doing counterinsurgency well. And so it’s in the insurgents interest to prevent that kind of information sharing between civilians and counterinsurgents.

And so I argue that targeting women is one way that they prevent this information sharing. And it happens kind of through two sort of pathways. One is that women actually have got really different and useful information. And this is something that I think wasn’t obvious at first. I think a lot of these places where— I studied these the cases of Somalia and Iraq and Nigeria, you think that, well, it’s a kind of patriarchal society so do these women, like, actually know anything. And are they actually sharing this information?

And in every case, actually, I found that not only do women have different information, but that they are sharing it with either the insurgents or the counterinsurgents. So that in stopping that, if you’re the insurgent, kind of, sharing process between the insurgent– the counterinsurgent, sorry, and the civilians is really important. And I argue that targeting women can be, like, one pathway to that.

The other part of the information transmission suppression mechanism is that targeting women can make the population in general feel unsafe and feel less likely to cooperate with counterinsurgents. And that kind of leads into the second mechanism, which I call the “emasculation mechanism,” which is that women are often cast by the counterinsurgent as this special class of civilian, that they’re special, they’re vulnerable, they need — particular innocent. They need, really– they need to be protected.

And that targeting women can actually be a means of emasculating the largely male counterinsurgent force. And then on top of that, it also– the emasculation can be both sort of internally felt by the counterinsurgents, but also really emasculating them publicly to show the civilian population that these counterinsurgents can’t really protect you because look, here we come. And we can, you know– you can’t even protect the most innocent of your civilians. You can’t even protect the women. So what good are you as a counterinsurgent?

And if your a civilian making the decision between supporting, either overtly or tacitly, the insurgent or the counterinsurgent, you’re sort of messaging to them that you’re not going to get good protection if you go with the counterinsurgent, so that you might as well kind of stick with the lesser of two evils, even if it means supporting the insurgent group.

So that’s the second mechanism that I propose. And then the third is this idea of bargaining leverage, which essentially we find most clearly in Nigeria, which is that gender-based targeting — or sex-selective targeting, as I call it — can actually be a means of extracting concessions — material concessions from the counter-insurgent, and that can actually lead to battlefield advantages for the insurgent group.

So in the case of Nigeria, they abducted these schoolgirls and the government was just desperate to get these schoolgirls back. And it’s not something that’s public, that the government hasn’t publicly acknowledged, so these are kind of different reports of what actually happened. But various reports suggest that the Nigerian government paid millions of euros to get a number of the schoolgirls back.

They released high-level Boko Haram commanders from jail in order to get the girls back. Obviously, these are really important strategic advantages for the group. And your adversary is basically just handing them to you. And so that is one way in which, really, that selective targeting can actually materially undermine the success of the counterinsurgency.

So those are the three mechanisms as I propose them. And then I argue that, in order for there to have been actual successful undermining, all three of the mechanisms need to have operated.

And kind of the point of the theory is that these mechanisms are more likely to bite if you’re a particular kind of counterinsurgent. And that’s why I look at three different actors, who are different types of counterinsurgents.

SIZEK: So I think we can really understand how insurgents can benefit from attacking women or abducting women. And one of the questions that I have is, how do these groups frame it for themselves? Or, what sorts of evidence do you have to understand how they’re thinking about it, in addition to how the counterinsurgents are thinking about this?

CHANDRA: Yeah, it’s so challenging because first of all, it’s hard to interview insurgents. And I should also note that this project was conducted entirely virtually because of the pandemic, but also because, leaving those sort of real — very real constraints aside, I personally think as a researcher that it’s very hard to take insurgents at face value, because when they are making public statements, they know that they are speaking to multiple audiences.

They are speaking to the intelligence agencies of basically every major government. They are speaking to the government of the country in which they’re operating. They’re speaking to the local population that they’re trying to convince to take a particular perspective.

They might be speaking to other insurgent groups if they have rivalries with other groups. So it’s these– in even internal documents, I think it’s really hard to say that, “oh, I found this on a document, and therefore, this is what the doctrine is and it’s for x, y, and z reason.”

So that was one thing that made this project really challenging. And I used a method, a qualitative method called “process tracing,” in which essentially, what you do is say, OK, as a researcher, I cannot observe the actual mechanism or the process that I am claiming occurred. But let’s say it did occur, what would be the traces of that mechanism or the empirical fingerprints that I could find that would suggest that, that mechanism did operate as I posited it? So there’s a lot of sort of thought experi– or thought ex– what’s the word? Thought–

SIZEK: Exercise? Or experiments?

CHANDRA: Yeah, exactly. Like, staring at the wall thinking, if this happened, and what would I be able to see? And then you go and look for those things.

And I’ll give you a really interesting example of why I think you can’t just take it at face value what they say. Because in 2012, I believe, just a couple of years prior to the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria, the Nigerian military/police had arrested some of the wives of Boko Haram commanders.

And Boko Haram, these commanders were very upset about it. And the leader of the group said something like, now see what happens to your women. And when explaining the kind of change that I pointed to between 2012 and 2014, where the attacks on abduction of — as abduction as a tactic really grew from half a percent to 14% roughly, I — people really, scholars really use that as a way to explain why that change happened, that, oh, these Boko Haram commanders wives had been abducted. And so this was a revenge. The Chibok abduction was revenge for the abduction, or the arresting of these wives.

And when I actually got into it and thought, OK, well, does that make sense? Even though the group is saying stuff like, oh, we’re going to take revenge on you, in their actions, is that exactly what I would expect to see if they were actually taking revenge?

And so I take issue with this, what I call the “revenge narrative,” because if you think about it, the timing is really far off, right? It’s two years later that they start doing abduction of schoolgirls. If you’re taking revenge, you wouldn’t think that they would wait two years to do so, right?

Then the other thing is that, they say their sort of threat was, “see what happens now to your women,” which would suggest sort of high-level military wives as opposed to schoolgirls. So I think you don’t really think like your women are some schoolgirls in a different part of the region.

And actually, as it turns out, they had abducted right around the time when they made the threat, some wives of local military commanders. And then they were— it’s unclear. Kind of, again, some of these things are not public, so there are different varying reports. It’s unclear whether the wives were eventually exchanged or not, but they did sort of follow through on the threat in a much more kind of immediate way.

And then the third thing that I think really calls into question, taking at face value what they’re saying, is if you think about this kind of revenge story, like, oh, we’re going to take revenge for you arresting our wives, there’s varying degrees of reporting on the preparedness of the group to actually perpetrate the Chibok abduction.

So some people say, they actually came to the school that night because they wanted to steal a brickmaker from the school. And they found the girls there, and they thought, again, because they’re insurgents, they, like, can throw things at the wall and see what sticks. They found the girls there, and they thought, oh, this would be good. Let’s just take the girls. And some of the girls themselves report that they didn’t— they came on motorcycles, and they had to call for big trucks to come when they realized there were this many girls unattended in the school. They had to call for big trucks to come.

So if you were actually– if you think about it, if the group were actually trying to perpetrate a mass abduction, I think they would know that the girls were there. They would know how many girls were there, and they would be prepared for— they wouldn’t have come on motorcycles. They would come on big trucks.

And so I think this is one sort of, like, a lesson of thinking about evidence in looking at what they do and what we would expect them to do if the theory that we were positing were correct.

Because if the revenge story were true, I don’t think this would have unfolded in the way that it did. And so that’s why I think it is really challenging. I look at different types of evidence. There are Human Rights Watch reports, Amnesty International reports, where they actually interview people on the ground was super helpful for me. That was good kind of firsthand accounting of what happened. I think also, you look at what the group says, other types of reporting, journalists who are on the ground, and then kind of coalesce it all together to see how you weight the evidence in different– different pieces of evidence based on the biases that might– that those pieces of evidence might bring.

But I think it is a very challenging question to approach. But I also think we have to be careful when we just say, like, the group said that they did it for this reason, therefore, they did it for this reason.

SIZEK: Yeah, I think you also point out that there are sort of, like, strategic, planned-ahead attacks on women, and that there are also just sort of, like, convenient moments where a bunch of Nigerian children appear and can be abducted, which also makes me curious about the sort of, like, convenience versus costliness of attacks against women, or perhaps abductions of women. So how, or in what ways is targeting women costly for insurgents or would not be in the benefit of insurgents? We’ve sort of covered the opposite direction, how they might benefit from it. But how is it not so great for them?

CHANDRA: Yeah, I think this is something that people do overlook quite frequently because again, I think there’s just this, out in the ether, this story that violence against women is just a part of war. But if you think about it, actually, violence against women can be quite costly to insurgent groups.

And that’s one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to study it, because it actually is quite puzzling when you think about it. And I identify three ways that violence against women is costly to the group.

The first is that it’s materially costly. And I look at forms of violence that are not just abduction. But if you think about abduction, right, if you think about what happened for Boko Haram right after they abducted these schoolgirls. And part of the challenge for the Nigerian government is that the schoolgirls’ abduction blew up into such a big international thing that the pressure became so high to get the girls back that it actually kind of encouraged the group to do more of that.

And I think that’s when I say that insurgents have the advantage to see what works. The initial abduction — and there are varying reports on the, like I said, the level of preparedness — so some people argue that they actually were prepared to abduct the girls that night, but they didn’t know that it was going to become such a big thing.

But they very quickly cottoned on to how valuable these girls were internationally, and how much pressure had been put on the Nigerian government and therefore, how much leverage they had, right, and gained in this way. And then, of course, that encourages kind of repetition of this behavior.

But if you’re also from the group’s perspective, you don’t know kind of what the tipping point is going to be, where the violence is going to start to gain so much attention from both the government or international organizations or whatever that it’s going to actually lead to your demise.

And so this– the kind of cost element of it, I think, is really important. And so the first way that I think about it is sort of the material cost. And if you look at the example of the schoolgirls, like a very basic-level thinking about logistics. You now have 270 schoolgirls. They’re not trained. They’re not– like, they’re not mobile. You have to carry them around on big trucks. They’re probably likely to run away. You have to feed them, clothe them, house them. It’s very difficult to move them.

And so from that sort of perspective of being, like, a nimble organization that you now have these schoolgirls, I think that’s really challenging.

But if you think more generally, not just about abduction, if you are, as an insurgent group, trying to select the target of your violence in particular ways, it means that there are certain indiscriminate tactics that you can’t use.

You have to be much more trained and much more disciplined. Like IEDs or whatever, you know, blowing up things are not going to work because you can’t guarantee who the victim of that attack is going to be, right?

So I think it eliminates a number of tactical options for insurgent groups to focus their attention and resources on attacks, like types of attacks that specifically target women. So I think that’s the sort of first thing is that it’s materially costly to the group in a number of ways.

It can also, like I said, cost the group on the battlefield. And a good example of this comes from Iraq, actually in Anbar province, where what the US government called the Anbar Awakening, which was– basically occurred when the US showed up to Anbar province, largely US soldiers, but of course, the sort of broader coalition in Iraq.

And it’s a largely– these are– it’s largely Sunni Iraqis living here, so there’s kind of a natural affiliation for Al-Qaeda. And, you know– so initially, the US is just not making a lot of progress because there’s kind of sectarian violence that’s unfolding. And in the beginning, the US kind of empowered the Shia Iraqis. And so I think there was just a lot of suspicion about the US and its motives and ability to protect the community.

And Al-Qaeda kind of took advantage of this, but then started to be really coercive towards the population, including forcibly marrying its fighters to girls in the community. And this was something that the community then started to take umbrage at. Like, how dare you come in and tell us like, who’s going to marry our girls? And this kind of overly coercive violence actually tipped the local community into supporting the US.

Then when they thought about it, they were like, well, the US is actually kind of the lesser of two evils, so we might as well support the US, even though there had been, prior, this kind of natural affinity to supporting the insurgent group.

And so one of the challenges is that, as the insurgent group, there are kind of– there’s a lot of research on the strategic benefits to insurgents of using violence against civilians to coerce them into cooperating and things like that.

But the challenge for the insurgent group is they don’t know what the straw is that’s going to break the camel’s back, right? They don’t know, like, this particular attack or this piece of violence or this thing is going to be a bridge too far and now all of a sudden, the entire civilian community is going to turn around and support the counterinsurgent.

So I think it can be quite costly. And violence against women is particularly, I think, visceral for people experientially. And so I think there’s a lot of kind of feelings that pop up in the community that they may not anticipate, and they don’t know that– what’s going to– when that is going–that tipping’s point is going to arrive and once it does, it’s really hard for the insurgent to kind of walk it back ,just because that violence is so visceral for the community to experience. So that’s another way in which it’s really costly.

And then the third thing is it’s really reputationally costly. Like, people don’t like violence against women. They don’t like– they don’t want to support groups that perpetrate violence against women. It’s not– it’s, like, horrific. It’s really– people have really strong reactions to it.

If you read stories about violence against women, I’ve read lots of horrible things that have happened to people in the course of doing this research. And it is really– like, it touches you very deeply. And so if you’re an insurgent group, and you’re thinking about needing to recruit from that population or have the population support you, even by not kind of ratting you out to the counterinsurgent, it can be really reputationally costly if the group is perpetrating just horrific levels of violence against— and really sort of like abhorrent types of violence against women and girls in the community.

So it is– I think we’ve talked about kind of the ways that it can be strategically beneficial in some ways to the group to attempt to invest in these kinds of tactics, but it is a really high-risk, high -eward strategy, I would say. There is definitely a downside. And that’s why it’s so interesting because you want to understand kind what are the conditions in which groups will make the investment and take on the costs of investing in these types of tactics.

[SIZEK] Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about how these differences emerge or what the differences are that you tracked across the three different locations that you studied. So what does sort of the nature of the counterinsurgency have to do with whether or not targeting women is a good strategy for insurgents?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, so this is kind of the first part of the theory, I think I touched on this a little bit earlier, but essentially that the home population of the group — of the counterinsurgent actor, I should say is really important in kind of determining what will undermine them, what are the things that they’re going to start to say, like their electorate is going to start to say. Like, is this cost worth it, right?

And I think the other point that I want to make is that, the reason that I chose these three specific cases, in looking at all groups that were, at the time that I studied them, affiliated with Al-Qaeda – so Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Al-Shabab in Somalia – and Boko Haram in Nigeria, is that I think there’s a very strong tendency, particularly in the West, to assume that groups act a certain way — that these Islamist groups, specifically, act a certain way — because of their ideology.

Now, I’m not saying their ideology is not wildly patriarchal or sexist or problematic or even encourages violence against women. But what I find is that the ideology by itself does not explain the actions of the group. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting to look at these changes over the course of the conflict.

When you have the same actors with the same ideology making different decisions over time, I think it’s really important to kind of think about the context and what the strategic dynamics look like and what are the incentives that are being activated by what the counterinsurgent is doing.

And I think the kind of core part of the theory about why the counterinsurgent actor matters is really bringing counterinsurgents back into this. Because a lot of the research has really focused on, what is happening for the group that it’s making these decisions, and almost thinking about it in a vacuum as like they’re just deciding based on x, y, and z factors, what kinds of tactics to invest in.

And what I’m saying is, this is a dynamic between counterinsurgent and insurgent. And so what the counterinsurgent is doing, who they are, what they value really matters for how the insurgent will respond when the counterinsurgency really ramps up.

And so in terms of, why does the counterinsurgent actor matter? Because if you’re a domestic counterinsurgent, the sort of home audience to whom you are responsive as a government, who people who are funding you, the government that’s backing you, they expect that you are going to protect civilians.

They expect that you’re going to do everything you need to do to prevent this kind of harm from coming to civilians within your own borders. On the other hand, if you’re the US in Iraq, you may not have those expectations as clearly.

And I think that’s where I found that polling information so interesting, that people found— had a very high awareness— Americans in general, had very high awareness of how many civilians, sorry, how many service members had died, but not how many Iraqi civilians had died. They vastly underestimated how many Iraqi civilians had died in Iraq based on US operations there.

And so it just wasn’t– this is not to say that people didn’t care. Obviously, there were a lot of many different protests and different thoughts around the Iraq war at various different points. But in general, the American electorate did not use civilian death as a means of tracking whether the US government was succeeding in Iraq. What they used instead was how many American soldiers are dying in Iraq.

And if too many soldiers are dying in Iraq, then we have to ask ourselves, is this cost worth what we’re paying for it? And again, I think that’s where insurgents are smart, and they learned that these particular— these are the particular soft spots and weak points for the counterinsurgent. And can I– can we develop or invest in technologies that really expose those weaknesses?

[SIZEK] And so how does this work at the regional level? Because I know that we haven’t talked that much about Somalia. But what about the third case, and how does this sort of play in relation to this international counterinsurgent versus the national level counterinsurgent?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, Somalia is such an interesting case because it’s a case of a regional counterinsurgent. So it’s not like what I call an Iraq completely foreign counterinsurgent where the US shows up. Most vast numbers of US soldiers do not speak Arabic. They cannot communicate. They’re using locals for in translation. And there’s just no understanding of regional local norms at all, to the point where, in fact, a lot of folks thought that the violence that was occurring into what became just vast amounts of sectarian violence, that they thought it was normal. They just thought this is, like, what it is to be in Iraqi society.

So I think what’s so interesting about Somalia is that you have regional– a regional counterinsurgence made up of kind like neighboring states of Somalia. And so they have kind of more awareness of local norms and kind of, like, what is normal. And I think what I find there is that it’s kind of in the middle of the domestic counterinsurgent and the foreign counterinsurgent.

That in Iraq, the only mechanism that I found evidence for in accordance with the theory, was the information transmission suppression, because I find that women always have information, and they always are sharing it with counterinsurgents.

That is true basically no matter how patriarchal, how repressive the insurgent group, the society. It’s a way in which women have a lot of agency that we don’t actually kind of consider them having agency.

But in Somalia, I find that, in addition to information transmission suppression, the emasculation mechanism did operate, because civilians did start to express qualms about the efficacy of AMISOM’s operations, based on the increase and sort of change in the tactics that Al-Shabab perpetrated when AMISOM kind of ramped up its counterinsurgency operations.

So I find that there was more, you know, more sort of effect, and the kind of more effort on the part of the insurgent group in that case to try to undermine the counterinsurgent based– using sex-selective targeting. But it didn’t quite rise to the level of success of what we saw in Nigeria where, like I said, they were just able to extract millions of euros and actually get fighters released from jail, based on their sex-selective targeting.

So I think it kind of shows this interesting case of, it’s– the international kind of regional counterinsurgents have a strong interest in preventing civilian violence, also because it tends to spill over into their own borders. Whereas to be honest, there wasn’t a risk of spillover violence from Iraq into California, right? It wasn’t a thing that we worried about. Like, we’re doing this thing here and if we don’t do it well, then that means the US borders are less secure.

Whereas in Somalia, there was– the stakes were higher, if you’re a regional neighbor, to make sure that you’re doing counterinsurgency well. But it didn’t rise to the level of expectation of really preventing widespread violence against women. And I think it’s an interesting case because as kind of the US– you saw the US withdraw from Afghanistan, kind of– we’ll see what happens in the next election and see where sort of– how US policy develops.

But in general, I think there’s this kind of withdrawal of the US from these large-scale operations and kind of long-term missions and operations of military bases and just, like, thousands of soldiers indefinitely conducting counterinsurgency operations. And as that happens, I think you will see a shift towards empowering more these regional kinds of organizations like AMISOM or things like that.

And so I think it’s really important– it was an important case because as that sort of becomes, I think, more likely the way that the US, it will, instead of doing it itself, may fund or support or send support and training to these more regional organizations. I think it’s important to understand kind of how the incentives are operating in those cases as well. So it was a really interesting case study from that perspective.

[SIZEK] Yeah, so this brings us to perhaps our final question, which is obviously one of the goals of research like this is to try to prevent or reduce gender-based violence. What do you think your research can bring as a policy solution or as a strategy to try to reduce these harmful effects of sex-selective targeting?

[CHANDRA] Yeah, such a great question. I mean, that’s something that really motivated me every day when I was doing the research. And I think it would be a few things. One is that, again, I think there’s really this tendency to think that ideology explains a lot more than it does in these cases.

And again, that’s not to say that the ideology is not important. It’s just something I consider more as a background factor. And so I think understanding the context, and the kind of strategic dynamics on the ground and understanding these as conflict dynamics and decisions that are made in response to actions by counterinsurgents, I think is really important. I think that’s an important lesson from this research.

I think the other thing is, it really opens up avenues for future research, as well. Like, one of the things I think this kind of lays the groundwork for is thinking about whether there are discernible patterns that we could learn about or learn from when groups choose particular types of violence over others.

So I think when you say violence against women, most often people assume that you’re talking about sexual violence. So I think the other thing that I’ve done is really move beyond just sexual violence to looking at non-sexual, physical violence, abduction, things like that, kidnapping— that we hadn’t really studied in depth as a field too much yet. And I think it’s good. Lots of people are starting to do that work, which is really exciting for me as someone who’s in that space.

But I think there’s a lot of work still to be done, like thinking some groups, for example, the Taliban, which is a case I don’t study. But the original Taliban in Afghanistan, they did a lot of physical violence. They were really repressive, as people might remember if you were thinking about the very early days of the Afghanistan, war in Afghanistan.

But they didn’t do rape. They just were not– people would say like, oh, we leave our doors open. They’re not dangerous from a sexual violence. No one one’s going to come in into your house and, like, steal your kid or your daughter and, like, rape her.

And it was similar to Al-Shabab in the beginning, too, that they were incredibly repressive. I mean, there are these stories of– you know, there’s one story that really stuck with me of a woman who, her two-year-old ran out the door of her house. And so she ran after the two-year-old, of course, into the street. And she did not stop because, of course, her child had run into the street. She did not stop to put on her abaya. And Al-Shabab captured her and said– punished her pretty harshly for not having her abaya on, even though she had been running after her child who had run into the street.

And so there was a lot of non-sexual physical violence that they would perpetrate in punishment for having broken these rules, but they didn’t do sexual violence. So I think this– one avenue for future research is just thinking, what– why do some groups select into particular forms of targeting over others, and what can we learn from those patterns? So I think that’s another– it kind of lays the groundwork for future research.

But I from a policy perspective, the most important lesson is we think about these kind of contemporary theories of counterinsurgency as just cookie cutter in some ways, that you can apply it anywhere.

And I think there was a lot of work that went into developing the kind of hearts and minds and the kind of doctrine that the US eventually shifted to during the Iraq War. And it’s clear from this research that who the counterinsurgent is really matters, and that doing counterinsurgency in particular ways can actually increase incentives for targeting women.

So I think learning from this that you can’t just– if you’re the West, and you’re moving away from doing counterinsurgency yourself towards training and equipping or things like that, I think understanding the context of what’s happening, who the actors are, and how the particular behavior that we’re advocating — or the particular sort of operational approach that we’re advocating — can actually change the incentives for different types of behaviors in response is really important.

So not just going to places and saying, do it this way, but really thinking about, what is the context, what are the different incentives, and what are the conflict dynamics that are occurring here?

[SIZEK] Well, thank you so much for telling us about your research and learning more about the intersection of gender and international security.

[CHANDRA] Thank you so much for having me.

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[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Emotion, Race, and Gender: Interview with Gold Okafor

Published December 4, 2024

Gold Okafor is a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research questions include, “how does the race and gender of an emotional person influence the judgments of the emotional person?” For example, how is an angry Black woman judged differently from an angry White woman, and what are the downstream consequences? And how do we accurately measure mindfulness, an emotion regulation strategy, within Black Americans?

Okafor is Ford Predoctoral Fellow and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. Her past papers include “Measuring Mindfulness in Black Americans: A Psychometric Validation of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire.” This interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, who was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at Social Science Matrix.

Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

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Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Julia Sizek. And today, we’re recording live at our on-campus recording partner, The Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio. Today on the podcast, we have Gold Okafor, a PhD candidate in social and personality psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a Ford predoctoral fellow, and a recipient of an American Psychological Foundation Scholarship. She investigates racial and gender disparities through emotion research. Her research has examined how people judge the emotions of others in relation to their race and gender, and the topic that we’re discussing today, how to measure mindfulness within Black Americans. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Gold Okafor: Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Sizek: So let’s get started by just understanding what mindfulness is. As you know, mindfulness has become a buzzword and may not mean anything to many people anymore. So how would you define mindfulness, as a psychologist?

Okafor: Great question. So mindfulness, the practice originated from Buddhist traditions, and the mindfulness that I research and talk about in my paper is mindfulness that has been brought over to the Western world and very westernized. However, within that, there are five facets or factors within mindfulness.

So it’s observing, describing, as in, I describe things as I see them, acting with awareness, being non-judgmental, and non-reactive. And so all of those five components act together as mindfulness. And while I don’t focus mainly on, what is it, there’s a huge debate within psychology of, what exactly is it? Is it just five factors? Does observing even matter? But what I do in the paper that we are going to talk about is more say, OK, how do we measure it accurately? And how do we measure it within a population that has not had it validated in before?

Sizek: Yeah. So maybe let’s get started on just like how mindfulness is normally measured. How would you measure, if you are observing yourself, for example?

Okafor: By me, you mean me, or practitioners?

Sizek: As a practitioner— or like, a practitioner or as a psychologist, how would you evaluate if someone is successful at observing?

Okafor: Yeah. Great question. So success is definitely a relative term. I don’t think that people aim for, ooh. I’m successful at it, because people like to use the floss analogy with mindfulness. So it’s like, ooh, if you like, don’t floss one day. Does that mean that you’re horrible at flossing? And you’re never going to floss again?

And then similarly with mindfulness, like once you do and practice mindfulness and you like can be– there are days when you miss it, there are days when it works, and the days when your mind is just all over the place. But back to the main question of, how do we measure it in the first place, so psychologists tend to use this scale called the five-factor or facet mindfulness questionnaire.

In short form, it’s the FFMQ. And not only do psychologists use it, it’s used predominantly within clinicians and practitioners. So say you have a primary care physician, and they recommend that you do mindfulness. Before they do that, they can tend to be like, OK, how likely is this patient going to actually practice mindfulness?

And so sometimes, clinicians can give you the FFMQ to measure their mindfulness and see how that works. So that’s the most common scale.

And that’s the scale that’s in my paper, that I talk about. And to speak to how common it is, a lot of times nowadays, if you are proposing either a study or you’re applying for a grant, they sometimes literally ask you to use the– they are saying, no. You have to use this five-factor mindfulness questionnaire.

And that’s happened to me and my colleagues before, in our own research, which is so interesting because as we’re going to get into, it’s been validated many, many times, but with only predominantly White samples in the English version. And so just trying to figure out like, OK, does this work with groups like Black Americans, Latinx, Asian-Americans? And so while I focus on Black Americans, I’m highlighting like, hey, we don’t even know the answer to so many different groups, but that’s how we currently measure it.

Sizek: Yeah. So maybe jumping into the subject of your research, can you tell us a little bit about what validation means, and also why you specifically wanted to focus on Black Americans as a subject of validation for this FFMQ test?

Okafor: OK. Definitely, I can talk about both of those things. Validation, within the field of psychology, it means that a scale or a measure is accurately doing what it’s supposed to do. And there are multiple types of validation. There’s construct validity. That means, hey, this is actually related to the construct of mindfulness.

And so, for example, saying, OK, mindfulness has been shown to decrease depression levels. So the scores on this scale should, in theory, inversely relate to depression or anxiety. And they should be positively related to life satisfaction or well-being. Things like that. So that’s construct validity. But then it’s also like temporal validity or temporal reliability.

So it’s saying, hey, if I take this survey on Monday, and then I take it again in two months, how different are my scores going to be? Because I’m the same person. And so if this is a valid temporal, reliable scale, then my scores should be highly correlated. So that’s a huge part of validity.

Also there is internal validity. And so that means the internal reliability within the factors. So again, there’s five factors in the five-factor mindfulness questionnaire. And being able to say, I’m sure that the observed factor and then the awareness factor are actually measuring different things.

And there’s more you could talk about it. What’s the relationship between the factors? Are they orthogonal? Are they hierarchical? But being able to know that is really, really important. And then finally, there are a level of reliability tests when it comes to statistics. So being able to say, we did a confirmatory factor analysis, and the results from this have produced numbers that are deemed passable based off of whatever standards.

And so that was a long-winded part of how to validate it. And then I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, you asked, how do I validate it within Black– or why is it important to validate it with Black Americans? Great question. So mindfulness, as within the Western world, is becoming this really popular tool to address mental health ailments.

And it’s really popular. You have it within– you see employers at top tech industries saying, hey, employers or employees, if you’re stressed or you are going through something here, here’s a free app to do mindfulness. And with that, mindfulness is relatively very accessible compared to other mental health treatments. So think about medication or therapy or other things that can be more costly compared to mindfulness.

While it can be costly to practice mindfulness with retreats, certain apps, certain programs, it’s more or less more accessible to more people. And it’s very important to study mental health within Black Americans, because they are more likely to have higher levels of depression, anxiety, and rumination compared to White Americans, and lower levels of satisfaction with life and psychological well-being.

So all of those are very important predictors of even larger problems, like coronary and heart issues. And within that same realm, Black Americans tend to have higher diagnoses — or higher frequency of diagnoses — of issues that tend to be highly correlated with stress. So think of high blood pressure. Black Americans tend to have higher blood pressure than White Americans.

That being said, so we have this mindfulness that’s popular and now easily accessible. Think about YouTube videos. But we don’t really know, now that it’s easily accessible, our groups that are more stressed out than the majority or more stressed out than the— I don’t want to say majority, but the prioritized group within society, how are we able to assess their mindfulness?

How am I able to confidently go to a doctor and say, hey, I’m stressed? And how is this doctor able to confidently tell me as a Black woman, OK, I can confidently assess your mindfulness with this scale? And so that’s like a long answer. But why it’s really important, even if Black Americans do not have desperate rates or percentages of mental health or diseases related to mental health, it is so important to make sure that all of our scales are validated across different cultures.

One really interesting thing, in the five-factor mindfulness questionnaire, there is an item that says something along the lines of, I notice the wind blowing in my hair. And I read that, and I was like, whoa. I normally have my hair in an Afro, it’s not in Afro today. It’s extremely windy and rainy today, and I’m not feeling the wind in my hair. And so how am I— or what if I had braids, or what if I had another— like, locks? How am I experiencing this?

And so that’s just another level of validity that currently doesn’t apply to Black Americans or a lot of Black Americans in that sense. And so it’s just a matter of, like, having a level of importance of, hey, this scale needs to be generalizable and usable across cultures.

Sizek: Yeah. And so it sounds like when the scale was developed, there were maybe only one or two groups of people in mind when they were thinking about it. And Black Americans were not included in that sample, which is why it’s really important to understand the limits of the scale, including, for example, for hair or other questions that they might have, they could be culturally specific without the people who made it realizing that it was that way. So as you were looking at this questionnaire, what were the other components of the questionnaire that you were concerned about or thought maybe would be difficult to translate or move across different groups?

Okafor: I do want to say that the scale was originally validated within predominantly White samples. They did not report, and most of the validations, they don’t report the ethnicity, past the majority. So if it’s over 50% one ethnicity, they’re going to only report that, or not at all, which is problematic within itself. And so there could possibly have been 1 out of the 200 or so participants who were Black in the first validation. But still, it’s not representative.

And then when it comes to what made me say, hmm, is this going to be applicable to Black Americans? I’m going to focus on the observed factor. And so the observed factor is the ability to observe things both internally and externally. So internally meaning like, ooh. I’m hungry. And externally as in like, ooh, it’s hot. The observed factor actually has a history of a lot of psychologists saying, yo, this is a funky factor. Is it more so awareness? It’s weird that one factor is combining both internal and external constructs together. It’s funky.

But then beyond that, within Black Americans or people who tend to be– whose safety is often put on the line or their safety is often in the forefront of their mind due to systemic racism, due to how they are over-policed, due to the safety of the environment or neighborhood that they live in, the ability to walk down the street and notice the sun on your face or the wind in your hair, if you could, in the first place, is very in-line with your ability to even walk down the street and not worry about your safety.

And not to say that non-Black Americans or White Americans are not worried about their safety as they walk down the street. But there are more things that Black Americans have to have in their mind. They have to be like, OK. I’m walking down the street. I am a Black person. Is the person who is not a Black person walking across the street because they’re scared, which many studies have shown that to be the case?

There’s a police officer driving by. Do I focus more on making sure I just walk one foot in front of the other and not necessarily do anything that might be interpreted as dangerous or illegal or whatever for the officer to pull me over? There’s so many things that can be going through someone’s mind, particularly, if you are an underrepresented or marginalized member of a group. And so mindfulness within the Western world tends to not acknowledge that. And that’s particularly seen in the scale, as well.

Sizek: Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re asking someone to evaluate external factors that are totally unrelated to other parts of their experience that might be more important, then how do they fare on the scale? So maybe let’s transition to that. In the work on validation that you were doing, how did you find that this FFMQ applied as a measure of mindfulness for Black Americans?

Okafor: OK. So spoiler alert, it was indeed valid. And we didn’t just do the full 49-item FFMQ scale, we also did the short version. Because not everyone has time to give their patients or their participants a 49-item scale. We also validated it within 15 items. And so we did this across a large sample of Black Americans that were diverse across the representation of income, skin tone, and ethnic heritage.

And it did validate. That means that this scale does measure what it says it’s supposed to measure within Black Americans. That being said, what my study doesn’t speak to is whether or not this is the most accurate way to measure mindfulness within Black Americans. It’s just saying that it’s valid, and a practitioner can confidently give this scale to Black Americans, and it will validly measure the mindfulness that is also being measured within a White American.

So yes. So yeah. To answer your question, it’s valid, but that doesn’t mean that future work shouldn’t dive into, OK, now how do we make a scale that is very particular to the needs of a Black American culture? So the relationship between mindfulness and its misconception or misrepresentation within religion, and how Black Americans have a high tendency, a higher tendency than White Americans, to be religious. And so how is that being played within a Black American’s practice of mindfulness? So that’s not answered in the study. But for now, what we can confidently say is that it does work to measure it, and then Black Americans.

Sizek: And that’s definitely a good thing to find, even though, I think, there’s probably a lot of room for improvement with this questionnaire and probably many other questionnaires that we use for things. So one of the things that you did in this study as well is that you were looking at in-group differences, which is, if Black Americans are understudied in psychology, then perhaps, in-group differences between Black Americans are maybe even less studied. So can you speak a little bit about what some of these in-group differences were and how you thought they might change the data or the different experiences that these people have within the one group of Black Americans?

Okafor: Yes. So my favorite part of the paper — and of the study — was what we did something called an “invariance analysis.” And invariance means, hey, people are going to answer this question whether or not they are part of one group or another. So, for example, if you have a math teacher, and they give you a test and the question is, OK, it’s— the football is on the 10-yard line, and they went up 2 yards off the first down, where is the football on the second yard line, or the second down?

And that used to be sometimes like a type of question that you can get from math teachers. However, that question might have a gender invariance, where boys are more likely to answer the question correctly than girls. And so, that right there is an invariance problem. And so to address that, you do an invariance analysis where you say, all right. Let’s look at how the boys respond. Let’s look at how the girls respond.

And if it’s different, statistically different, then we have a problem. And so in our study, within all of our Black American sample, we said, OK, let’s look at gender, let’s look at ethnic heritage. And so that’s people who are descendants of the enslaved, or people who recently migrated to America within– so, for example, saying they’re Nigerian or Caribbean.

And then we also looked at skin tone. So we looked at fair, medium, and dark skin tone shades of their face to see if, hey, is that a possible— are people of different skin tones interacting with stress and mindfulness differently in these patterns? We also did household income, which is important, because I said earlier, mindfulness can be marketed to people of higher class, or people who have access to employers who are comfortable paying for their mindfulness app, which is super interesting because this is actually the first study to even look at income. White, Black, never looked at income before, which is super-duper fascinating.

Finally, we looked at perceived discrimination, because Black Americans can perceive discrimination at different levels, right? So it’s very subjective to their own personal experience and their own personal definition, and you know, how they identify experience as discrimination.

All that to say, we did that invariance analysis. And I do have the code on my OSF link to the manuscript. So if people want to copy that code and do their own invariance analysis and future studies, I highly, highly recommend they do that. All that to say, the FFMQ was not invariance on all of those subgroups.

And again, my favorite part of the study, because it just really highlighted, hey, this is generalizable, this validation can be generalizable across Black Americans, regardless of income, gender, skin tone, et cetera. And that’s so important. And I hope that it’s like a platform for other studies to do the same.

Sizek: Yeah. So, I mean, do you have any ideas of how you want to apply this sort of in-group analysis to other studies that you’re looking at in the future?

Okafor: Yes. So I strongly believe that — as you mentioned, I study gender and racial bias through emotion research. And I say that I like to have principles in my research, and one of my key principles is intersectionality, and really being able to see like, OK, how are Black women treated differently or perceived differently than Black men, than Black — than White women and White men?

And so it sounds like a very simple question of like, well, duh. They’re different people. They’re different groups. They have different experiences. But psychology is a little, or a lot, late to the party. And they don’t have a lot of research that cares about gender and race intersectionally, right?

So they’ll say, OK, we’re going to compare men to women, but all of the stimuli would be White men and White women. Or they care, OK, let’s look at race. And they’re going to do White versus Black. But then all the stimuli would be Black men and White men. And that leaves out Black women.

So definitely in the near future, you will see a lot of work that — from me, that looks within-group analyses and intersectional identities and how we can really look at that within our samples.

Sizek: Yeah. So maybe this is a good time to transition to talk a little bit about some of your dissertation research, which also addresses this question, although in a very different way from sort of the mindfulness study. So in your dissertation research, you’re focusing more on how people perceive emotions of different folks. So can you just talk a little bit about your general, sort of, arc of the dissertation?

Okafor: Yes. So it’s dissertation, so it’s kind of long. And so we started off, and this was my first year of grad school. I started off being a little young PhD student and not knowing exactly what I wanted to research. And I remember seeing Serena Williams, and she was at a tennis match. And one thing happened over– And I forgot exactly what happened. But she was angry and smashed her tennis racquet on the ground.

And it received so much backlash. People were drawing her as if she was a monster. There was literally a cartoon from Australia of a cartoonist who drew her as this like, heavy-set monster, and then her opponent, Naomi Osaka, who’s also a Black woman, was literally drawn as a blonde-haired, White person in the background. And so it was just a really interesting thing, because when you think about it, sports are very emotion-driven.

You think about when Kobe is angry, that’s encouraged. That’s totally fine. But when you think about other White male tennis players who are notorious for breaking racquets and are notorious for being angry, they’re being judged different and perceived different. And so that made me start something that I call the “Serena Williams Project,” which is like a fun internal joke, where I question, how are people judging emotional expressers differently as a function of the expresser’s gender, race, and emotion?

And so to do that, I developed a paradigm where I had participants see an image that was a person who was either Black or White, male or female, expressing the emotions angry, neutral, or sad. And accompanied with this picture was a scenario that clearly explained why the person was angry, neutral, or sad.

And then after that, I said, OK, so how warm is this person? How competent is this person? How intelligent? Do you want to be this person’s friend? Do you want to work with this person? And with that, we found really interesting results. And so, the first time we did the study, we ran it around, I think it was like 600+ UC Berkeley undergraduate students. And we saw that the results were not what we thought. We saw that Black people, both Black men and Black women, were rated more warm and more competent than White targets.

And that’s odd. And we were like, whoa, what’s going on? And then we dug a little bit deeper, and we realized that when we compare the anger ratings to their neutral ratings, that’s where it gets super-duper interesting. So if I were to, out of nowhere, become angry at this moment, you would think I’m less warm. That’s a totally natural reaction.

And that’s how anger is theorized within psychology. Anger is supposed to signal a threat or action. And so when someone is expressing anger versus their neutral expression, they should be judged as less warm. And that’s the case for White men, White women, and Black women, but not for Black men.

Black men are judged equally as warm when they are angry than when they are neutral. And so that was really fascinating. So I’m in the process of digging deeper. I replicated it already. I added an element of cognitive load to see if the responses were automatic versus deliberative. And we get the exact same findings over and over and over again.

And I call it the “default emotional stereotype,” such that we have these emotional stereotypes of, for example, angry Black men or emotional women, overly emotional women, that are so ingrained within our society that when you see a neutral person of the stereotype’s target — so, for example, if you see a neutral black man — you are likely to judge them as if they were actually expressing anger.

And then vice-versa, when you see an angry Black man, you trivialize that anger as, well, that’s how they always are. Or a woman’s emotion is like, oh, that’s how they always– they’re just overly emotional. And then when they actually are emotional, or when they’re in pain, it’s being trivialized as like, oh, you’re not in that much pain, or things like that.

And so that is my dissertation research, and I’m so excited to continue diving deep in that, and being able to say, OK, like, this is why we have situations like Obama, who is known for being calm, cool, and collected, but during his presidency, a lot of his critics would identify him as angry, when he wasn’t.

And it can be important when we look at within hospitals, and how practitioners — circling it all back to health care — how practitioners prescribe pain medication differently by the gender of their patients, and then moreover, they prescribe pain medication way less to Black women versus White women.

And we see that in the mortality rates of people who are giving birth. The birth mortality rates. And Black women are more likely to die versus White women while giving birth. And so many studies have looked into like, OK, why? Is it income? No. Is it health-care literacy? No. And it kind of boils down to, it’s just their race.

And so long answer to a wonderful question, I’m super-duper excited to be looking at how we judge emotional people differently as a function of gender and race — and particularly, differently compared to their neutral expression.

Sizek: Yeah. So I mean, one of the interesting things that you raise in the work that you’re doing is how this could actually help explain some health disparities that we’re seeing elsewhere. And so how do you think this research, which I know isn’t done yet — how do you think it might be applied to help people better understand things like unconscious bias, and how it is affecting their patients or just affecting the way that they treat people in the world?

Okafor: Great question. So I will say, I don’t test unconscious bias, and I love that about my research. I actually test— I’m outright asking you, like, hey, essentially, are you biased? And so it’s very, very explicit bias. And it’s not— yeah. And so all that to say, when it comes to applying this research into the actual field, it really is saying, hey, first, we need to identify that there actually is a problem.

And so this is saying, this research is groundbreaking because it’s saying, hey, there’s a problem by gender and race together. As opposed to, previous work has always said, a problem by race by itself or a problem by gender by itself, and that’s not generalizable. So it’s the same generalizable problem that we get with the mindfulness skills.

And so when it comes to applying the work, this work can say, OK, we are able to measure it. And when you are able to measure it, you’re able to figure out, OK, what interventions can be applied to mitigate these effects? And so now that we have a way to measure and identify an issue, we can now say, ah! Now we can apply this intervention to decrease the gender and racial bias that can happen.

For example, there’s a paper in, I believe, 2019 by Jessica Salerno and colleagues, who looked at how juries view anger on a lawyer differently as a function of the lawyer being either a Black woman or a White woman. And super interesting, and again, this work is foundational to our understanding. And now that we have that, we can go, OK, we have a way to measure it. Now, how do we fix that? What intervention can be done to juries or to lawyers or to judges to decrease this disparity that we are seeing? So yeah. That’s a long-winded answer of, I am — we are still at the identification process, and that’s what I’m doing right now.

Sizek: So I think one of the things that you point out is that this is a research that psychology needs to be doing more. So what are some of the exciting directions that you’re seeing in psychology, where people are actually looking at intersectionality or looking at these in-group differences that you’re examining in your research?

Okafor: So yeah. I am super-duper excited for the amount of researchers who are pioneering a way of intersectionality research, culture psychology research. Here at Berkeley, we have [Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson], in the business school, who received her PhD in social psychology. And a lot of her work brings in intersectionality not just of gender and race, but also sexual orientation, things like that.

And then we also have so many researchers who are asking really important questions about intersectionality. That being said, psychology, and many other fields– [inaudible] — needs to incorporate other people or other groups’ period.

So there’s something called WEIRD populations or WEIRD samples. It’s an acronym for Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, and– I’m forgetting what the D, I think the D probably stands for Developed. Yeah. Developed samples. And so that’s the tendency for psychology to use college samples. So it’s people who are predominantly White in that.

And so we still have a WEIRD problem within psychology. And, while it’s so important to be intersectional, it’s also so important to just have non-WEIRD samples. Like I have with the Black American sample. And I will say, it’s being more welcomed, and that’s super exciting.

My own advisor, Iris Mauss, who is just an amazing researcher, has wonderful knowledge on emotion research. And just her openness and willingness to work on intersectionality with me is a testament of how people are like, OK, yeah. This is the time to work on it, and this is the time to study it.

That being said, academia has a very WEIRD problem that loves to– yeah, loves to have their sample and loves to have their majority be White men. And it’s an uphill battle, for sure. But we’ve already started the battle. And I’m grateful to not be the one that started the battle. I’m just following the people who have been doing that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sizek: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and telling us about your efforts to fight the battle to have better representation in psychology.

Okafor: Yay. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated this. This is great.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

The Imperiled Place of Universities and Democracy in the USA: An Interview with Todd Wolfson

Published November 19, 2024

One measure of the fragile state of many democracies is the way in which public universities have come under attack around the world. A new monthly podcast series, produced as part of the Global Democracy Commons project, seeks to address the myriad forces seeking to foreclose public universities as spaces of critique and democratic protest across the globe.

The series explores diverse trends such as related to the defunding of higher education; its redefinition as a private not a public good; the increasing authoritarian nature of university management; the use of culture wars and discourses of civility to police classrooms; the waves of layoffs and closures of departments and programs; and the attempts to delimit academic freedom, free speech, and rights of assembly and protest.

We hope our conversations with those who work in higher education around the world will allow us to consider the degree to which the university has become the canary in the coal mine for the fate of democracy.

Episode 2

In the run up to the American election we talked to Todd Wolfson, the new President of AAUP, about how public disinvestment from higher education and the culture wars have transformed colleges in ways that make them less democratic places and imperil democracy across the country.

Listen below or on Apple Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

James Vernon: Hello, my name is James Vernon, and I am Professor of History and the Director of the Global Democracy Commons at UC Berkeley. Welcome to our new series of podcasts on democracy and the public university.

In these podcasts, we explore around how, around the world, universities are increasingly being targeted as spaces of debate, critique, and democratic protest. We hope our conversations will allow us to understand why universities have become the canary in the coal mine for the fragile state of our democracy in so many countries.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement here at UC Berkeley, and the introduction of new restrictions on protests at the University of California and over 100 other campuses across the US, our first podcast explored the relationship of free speech and academic freedom to the fragile history of democracy in America over the past century. You can find that podcast on our website, demos.berkeley.edu, or wherever else you find your podcasts.

Today, I’m thrilled to be in conversation with Todd Wolfson. We ended the last podcast discussing the importance of unionizing for trying to prevent the political and economic conditions that are degrading the place of public universities in democratic life.

Todd has been at the forefront of that endeavor, first, by helping to establish a wall-to-wall union at Rutgers University through AAUP/AFT, and then helping to lead that union during a strike last year that successfully improved pay and conditions for all categories of workers there, but especially the lowest-paid and most vulnerable.

Earlier this year, he was elected as president of the AAUP as part of a new leadership team that is endeavoring to energize the labor organizing capacities of that organization. In his spare time, he’s an anthropologist who does his field work in digital media, a scholar of social movement, and teaches as a professor in the School of Communication and Information Studies at Rutgers, New Brunswick.

Welcome, Todd. Congratulations on the new job. And thank you so much for taking the time today.

Todd Wolfson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Vernon: So let’s get straight into it. Last week, Hank Reichman and I discussed the new McCarthyism sweeping the land and the ways in which new restrictions on protests at universities are often gloved in the language of institutional neutrality or the language of civility and community.

We also touched on how this political attack on universities — and the broader effort to neutralize them as spaces of civic education and dissent — was related to public disinvestment and the transformation of what some people call “academic capitalism.”

So today, I’m hoping we can dwell on what you think characterize the new political and economic realities of higher education in the US and why you think that demands new forms of organizing by professors and all types of academic workers.

And perhaps, you could also tell us what your vision of the new leadership group for AAUP is and what you think makes that necessary in the conditions we work in at present.

Wolfson: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. And I think I want to start— it sounds like where you and Hank left off.

So, I mean, our assessment, certainly my assessment, is that there are at least two forms of crisis that are deeply entwined that higher ed faces. And they’re entwined from the beginning, which is important to note.

The first is, as you noted, I don’t know if — 50 to 60 years of federal and state defunding or divestment from public higher education, starting in the 70s and accelerating. I think maybe over the last couple of years, it’s been the first time we’ve seen an actual uptick in state investment in higher ed, but it’s just a tiny bit. And it comes after decades of just pulling more and more resources away from our public institutions, so to speak.

About Rutgers, to make that point: right now, at present, the Rutgers budget is about $5.5 billion. And the state puts in about maybe between $500 and $600 million. So 10% of the budget goes to the state university. That’s it.

And so that’s got a long history. And it’s important to note about that history that it came on the heels of the ’60s. And it came at the same time that people of color were getting broad access to free or highly subsidized public higher education.

And I think the defunding actually started in California under Governor Reagan. And it was specific and focused. This is the anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. And I think Reagan and his team were very obsessed with that and obsessed with Berkeley, and specifically said that they needed to defund the UCs because of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and said things about not having an educated proletariat.

And so defunding— so in that moment, CUNY and the UCs in particular were fully subsidized, and most of the other public universities were highly subsidized. And then we see this massive divestment. But it’s important to note that that divestment that happened was not only — as I have argued in the past, but many have argued — neoliberal or economic in its engine, it was political and racialized divestment. And so I think I want to start there.

We see that divestment take place over the next 50 to 60 years, and we see all of the outcomes we both know and we all— your listeners know, which is mountains of student debt, skyrocketing tuition at public universities, as well as private, certainly. A dependence on short-term contingent contracts, particularly for teaching faculty, which has led to what people have called a justification, which is just really makes it impossible for part-time faculty to do their job because they’re working under conditions that make a lot of their work not paid — the work of writing a recommendation, for instance, et cetera.

But not just debt and contingency, but also, importantly, this new class of bureaucrats running our institutions and consequently mission drift, where our universities no longer know what they stand for.

At Rutgers, and at many schools in California as well, there’s a complete obsession with athletics. And the only part of the university that’s allowed to be completely in the red and it’s unquestionably not a problem is the athletics program. But if one of our campuses goes in the red for a minute, all freezing — all spending is frozen. But if the athletics go in the red, they’re like, OK, well, let’s just shovel another $100 million their way and hope they figure it out in the next decade.

But to come back to this bigger point, that mission drift has been a real problem for higher ed because we have leadership that no longer understand what the institution is for. So these are all the outcomes of divestment that we’ve seen, and we, and particularly, I would say, tenure-stream faculty, have not focused on or really taken on directly and also, the sector writ large.

And so that’s a critical part of the crisis we face. But then you need to overlay it with what we’ve seen over the last three, four, or five years, maybe accelerated by the genocide in Gaza and the encampments on our campuses, which is, we have seen real political repression, what you called new McCarthyism.

But it didn’t start in last year after October 7. It did not start then. It had already been operating for a couple of years before it and being driven by people like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who had already taken over the New College of Florida and tried to turn it into his own personal place to brainwash students. And it happened—

And then the ideas that emanated out of Florida have been moving into other states like Indiana, where they have put forward legislation where you have to have equal representation on all issues, which makes no sense when you’re talking about teaching a higher ed class.

All right. These are the two problems. And I think they’re entwined. And so that’s the crisis we face. And obviously, it’s led to massive political repression on our campuses. We’re now beginning to get the word on what they are trying to do to faculty, which is there has been at least one firing, if not, multiple firings of tenure-stream faculty for political speech around Palestine over the last year. Students have borne much of the brunt of this. And so we’re in a fight, where they want to control what we teach, what we research, and what our students think and say. And that’s the moment of crisis we’re in. That’s the reality.

Vernon: That’s wonderful. And it leads perfectly to where I wanted to go next because one way of conjoining those two crises — the economic crisis of disinvestment, which, as you say, has a very deep history now, and the political crisis of political repression and the new McCarthyism on our campuses — is by talking about the changing nature of university leadership and what we might think of as the administrative class of universities.

You talk there about the swelling size of administrators on university campuses and the ways in which we are experiencing mission drift, I think, was the term that you used. I wonder whether you could say a little more about that process of what a colleague of mine here has called “administrative bloat.” And what characterizes the sort of newly authoritarian nature of so many — of university leadership on so many campuses?

Wolfson: Yeah, I would love to. And I’ll start where this began, where I became clear on that, which is at Rutgers. So I was president of Rutgers. I came into to my leadership in the summer of 2019. Six months in the pandemic hit. And it hit New Jersey pretty hard. And Rutgers has about 30,000 workers and 70,000 students. And 20 some odd thousand of those 30,000 workers are unionized, and about, say, 8,000 to 10,000 are non-union.

And because we are the biggest union, Rutgers AAUP/AFT, and we represent the tenure stream faculty, as well as the full-time, non-tenure and grad workers and some counselors and librarians, but we’re the biggest.

The administration started coming to me after the pandemic hit and said, we’re going to have to do mass layoffs. And so they started prepping for a massive attack on the workforce. And so Rutgers AAUP/AFT leadership called together all the unions that represented the workers there. And we started talking about how we would want to approach the pandemic.

And we put forward a vision that was a people-centered approach to the pandemic, which we can go into. But basically said, look, we’ll do this thing called “work sharing,” where everyone furloughs, but we’re kept whole through the CARES Act and state unemployment insurance if you commit not to laying anyone off. There’s more to it, but I’ll just gloss it there.

I was one of the lead negotiators in the process of trying to get that deal, which took— we negotiated it over like a calendar year. And the people that sat across the table from me during what was the largest health crisis in the history of the country, arguably— the people who were negotiating with me knew nothing about the university.

It was a bunch of HR bureaucrats and lawyers. And their sole concern in that discussion was not, what is the role of a public institution in the midst of a health crisis? What’s its responsibility to its students, to its employees, to the families and to the great state of New Jersey? That’s not what they were thinking about.

They were thinking about, how do we save our bottom line? How do we assess risk and not get into problems? And so that was the mindset of the folks. So there was not one academic on the other side of the table, not one for the year we negotiated with them over this. We ended up getting a deal. But that’s not the point here.

The point here is, that is — the people who run our institutions today do not come out of the faculty anymore, or rarely do, and have no real connection to research, teaching, and service, and do not see the institution — this as a core role of the institution necessarily.

They see it– Rutgers could have been making widgets for all those folks knew that I was negotiating with. And so this brings me to your question about, what is the higher ed bureaucrat, this elite bureaucratic class that runs our institution? We could connect it directly to what happened last year on our campuses, and then what they’ve done over the summer.

And what I mean by that is, they dragged a bunch of presidents down to DC. And what we saw was a failure of the leadership of our universities to articulate the role and vision of the university in the face of Elise Stefanik and these other right wing ideologues in Congress, because they no longer understand, in large measure, what the University is for. And so we didn’t see the kind of full-throated response that valorizes the university the way we needed down in DC.

And then take it forward through the summer. Fine, they want to figure out how to deal with the possible encampments that are going to spring up in 2024. Did they speak to faculty? Did they speak to students? No, certainly Rutgers didn’t. It didn’t speak to its faculty. It didn’t speak to its faculty union. It didn’t speak to its staff or staff union, didn’t speak to its students.

It spoke to risk assessment consultants. And then, like 30 or 40 universities all spoke to the same risk assessment consultants, and they all got the same package. These risk assessment consultant firms probably made billions off public taxpayer money from California and New Jersey and every other state for the same package of BS, without any consulting of the people who make up the university.

And so we got the same thing in UC and California State universities got, which is time, place, and manner restrictions, which are draconian and completely undermine the core value of the university, which is a place of critical thinking and protest like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

And so it’s been completely hollowed out. The people who run our institutions do not care about our institutions, do not care about students or the staff and employees that make up our institutions, or the mission.

Vernon: I think that probably helps explain why we hear no efforts by university administrators to advocate for public reinvestment anymore. In part because, as you say, they’re not quite sure what the mission of universities are. But also, because they’ve given up on public reinvestment, and so much of their focus — even at public universities, where as you say, generally, around 10% of the budget now only comes from the state — so much of their effort is orientated towards generating new forms of commercial income and attracting private philanthropy. So there’s an additional pressure, then that they’re shaping their campuses around the imperatives of what’s going to be profit-driven and how not to offend donors.

And I’m wondering whether you see any of that feeding in. There’s a political defensiveness to DC and maybe to state leadership, but is there also this new embrace of institutional neutrality and trying to restrict protest on campus. Do you think it’s related to the commercial priorities now that so many university leaders seem to be mired in?

Wolfson: I think without a doubt. And I think, University of Pennsylvania is probably the prime example where the donors, even before October 7th of 2023, the donors were upset at the University of Pennsylvania because of an event called Palestine Rights that Roger Waters was invited to come to.

And they were already threatening the president, who has since stepped down, that they were going to take back their money. These are the donors who sat on the Board of Governors or the board. I don’t know if it’s a board, the equivalent of the Board of Governors there.

And then post 10/07 of 2023, it just accelerated so far that there were moments in time when the Board of Governors was saying— no, it wasn’t even the Board of Governors, the major donors to the University of Pennsylvania were saying that they wanted to put in place a set of speech codes. Donors. Donors to the University thought it was their right to put and enforce speech codes for the whole campus at the University of Pennsylvania.

So I think we see that– and I mean, that might be a bit of the extreme of what we’re seeing, but I think we’re seeing gradations of that everywhere. And so absolutely, there is a complete warping towards the needs of external forces that are funding our universities that is putting extreme pressure on our universities and colleges. Excuse me.

Vernon: So I’m thinking that if one part of the hope or of the mission of AAUP under your leadership is to re-energize the place of universities in the Democratic life of the nation, we have to start by democratizing our universities and allowing faculty and graduate students and students and everyone who works at a university to have a greater say in how those universities are run and how we conceive of the work that we do.

So I want to— if that’s the case, I want to— I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m sort of interpolating from our conversation. I want to focus on one particular area, which on my activism on this campus has struck me as more and more important. And that is trying to open up the budgets of public universities to public scrutiny. There’s a way, of course, in which public universities, especially theoretically, have budgets that are open to public scrutiny. But all of us who work in them know that they is a great deal of illegibility that is often quite deliberately maintained around questions of finance and budget.

And so whenever questions of resources come up at universities, and we know they come up very frequently, and especially in the endless austerity that we’re experiencing, it’s often the case that universities pick one set of interests against another. We can’t have an appointment here and an appointment there. We can’t reinvest in our library and have a football team. We need to raise our tuition rates because we don’t have state funding.

We can’t divest from Israel because our endowment is reliant upon— or we won’t even make public what our endowment is reliant upon. So I’m wondering whether you have any sort of thoughts about how it is that we can try and democratize the management of university budgets, or make them at least open to a little more scrutiny, not just for those of us who work, but for the taxpayers, for whom we will have to make a case for reinvesting in higher education.

Wolfson: Yeah. I mean, I could try. We’ve played with ideas, but we’ve never brought any of this is at Rutgers. But I think at national, at AAUP, I think we’d be really open to strategies that to work with campuses on different strategies.

And there is, AAUP does, in particular, have some amazing accountants that help organizations, whether they’re collective bargaining chapters of AAUP or AFT or they’re advocacy chapters doing analysis of the university’s budget.

There’s two things I’d flag here. Well, there’s three things I’d flag. First and foremost, we need to understand the budgeting models our universities use, and we need to get much more conversant in them. Rutgers uses a budgeting model called “responsibility-centered management.”

They hide behind it as a neutral budgeting system. But it’s important to note that Rutgers spent three or four years changing how the inputs and outputs of that particular budgeting model until they got the right mix and the right solution for how they had responsibility center management work at Rutgers, which means it was never neutral, and they were always playing with it in order to get the right outcome that they wanted for the university and how they developed it as a budgeting model for the university.

So first and foremost, it’s important to note that these systems they use are tilted towards their needs. But I guess, I’d say with respect to how we democratize it, there’s things that we’ve thought a lot about at Rutgers. One of them is running campaigns like they do sometimes in cities around a people’s budget, where we look at– so Rutgers has a $5.5 billion budget annually. So we do the best to look at what their budget is. And then we propose a counter budget.

And then bring in a public process, where students, staff, faculty, all talk about what their priorities are. And through that, we propose a budget that, in many ways, shows their budget for what it is.

And so I haven’t seen really— I’ve seen these campaigns run really well in urban municipalities. And the fact is that the UC budget, God knows what is it, $30 or $40 billion? I don’t even know. That’s a guess.

The Rutgers budgets, $5.5 billion. I mean, these are bigger than most municipal budgets. There’s no reason why we couldn’t be running campaigns and really working towards challenging them through offering an alternative vision of what the university is. Because we know that a budget is a political document first and foremost.

The one other thing I’d say, which is sort of connected, is that shared governance is critical to higher ed, but in many ways, it’s a myth. There are moments when it works, and those are important. And for universities and colleges that don’t have collective bargaining, it’s very important.

So advocacy chapters and CUCFA, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, I think it’s very important to have shared governance. But it’s also important to recognize that often, it’s toothless. Often. Not always, but often.

And so that then forces us to say, what’s the governance we need to imagine on our campuses? And I think it’s a time for us to start to imagine things like workers’ assemblies at the school level, at the department level, where we break down the barriers between full-time faculty, professional staff, part-time faculty, grad workers, ground staff, and we start to work together to bring up shared needs at the school level or at the building level. And then scale that up to a school-wide or university wide sort of assembly.

It would take a lot of work. I’m not saying this flippantly, it wouldn’t be easy to do. But it would be the kind of structure that would enable us to really, again, shine a light at Rutgers, the governing body is the Board of Governors. It’s the UCOP is the governing body?

Vernon: Yeah.

Wolfson: —of the UCs. So having this sort of thing at the campus level at Berkeley , and then also scaling it up, is a way to really put pressure back on the people who are running our institutions that don’t have a right to run our institutions. I mean, the people on our Board of Governors at Rutgers are people who’ve given money to the football program or to the governor or to what have you. And they don’t know anything about higher ed. So I don’t know. Those are just some thoughts.

Vernon: Yeah, no. That’s really interesting. But it raises the question, of course, of how we go about doing this. Because as we’ve been talking about this process of disinvestment leading to casualization, leading to the intensification of work on universities for all categories of workers, we’re all doing way, way more work for less than— it seems like every year, the workload increases.

So it becomes in that context, extremely difficult, often, to organize. And yet, interestingly, since the financial crisis of 2007-’08, the level of disinvestment and the erosion of tenure and casualization and intensification of work, the degradation of our benefits and our pensions, which we haven’t talked about at all, has helped lead to a massive surge of labor activism on university campuses.

But it’s also, at the same time, created an air of resignation or even just created docility amongst many of us. So I’m wondering, where we get the energy and the time, given the conditions in which we work, to try and reanimate both the democratic structures that currently exist on campuses and certainly those that should exist. How do we do that in the conditions in which we work?

Wolfson: Yeah. I think it’s a great question again, James. I mean, I’ll say this, and I don’t mean this, flippantly, But some of the most oppressed parts of our society, whether— have figured out how to organize under very difficult circumstances that are certainly at least as bad as the current university. And they figured out how to build power and fight back.

So I don’t think the conditions preclude us from doing this, I guess, is the point I want to start at. I think the real problem that we faced in our sector is that higher ed work– that as a workforce, so let’s just think about higher ed as a sector with a workforce.

As a workforce, we’re spread across 15 to 20 parent unions. And each one of those parent unions, national unions, has another workforce that’s much more important to them. So AFT or NEA have K-12, which is a priority. UAW has autoworkers. It’s a priority. CWA has communication workers. It’s a priority. AFSCME has municipal workers. It’s a priority.

And so what that’s created is a complete vacuum of leadership in the sector, and a lack of a shared vision for the future of the sector. And that’s made us very weak. And so I think the reason why we haven’t figured out how to organize— and you’re right, we have seen the greatest wave of militancy in higher ed that we’ve probably ever seen in the history of this country.

And importantly, higher ed is leading a broader labor militancy wave. It’s not a reflection of that wave. It’s a leading a wave, along with a couple other sectors. So it’s a very exciting time in our sector, but we’ve suffered from a lack of leadership.

A lack of leadership, because nobody has said, the future of the sector is ours to fight for. We must figure out how to fight for it. So you asked me like what the agenda of the new leadership of AAUP is in the earlier question. And I’d say that’s our agenda, is AAUP is the only union that is specifically for higher ed workers.

Now, it’s traditionally only been for really tenure-stream faculty, and that’s a problem. And I’m not in any way happy with that. And we need to push on that. But nonetheless, it’s the only union that’s higher ed, specifically.

And so we need to lead and we need to call in all the other workforces. We need to call on the other national unions, and we need to imagine a different vision for higher ed that counters both the 60-year divestment and the vision of the bureaucrats that run our institutions today, on one hand. But more importantly, right now, we need to counter the vision of higher ed being put forth by Ron DeSantis and JD Vance and Elise Stefanik.

And we have to re-articulate in people’s mind why higher education has been the bedrock, or a bedrock of our democracy, has been a critical engine of our economy, has been the major way people have had social mobility in a society, in a country that’s not created that much social mobility, particularly across race.

We have to articulate how it’s been an agent for social progress, for economic and racial progress, and show, through that, why it is central to the future of the country. Because right now, what’s being said about us in the national dialogue is that we’re a bunch of cultural Marxists, and we’re poisoning our children, and we’re lazy and blah blah, who knows what else. And they need to come in and control us. And the adults like Ron DeSantis need to come in and tell us what to do.

So we have to counter that. And I think that is the work necessary. And if we can do that work, both nationally, but then also articulate it at the campus, at the school, at the department level, we can begin to organize a new wave of resistance that, I think, needs to be driven by labor, but what needs to align itself to other forces, like the forces fighting over Palestine right now, faculties for justice in Palestine, students for justice in Palestine, but also student movements, et cetera.

So I think that’s the way forward, honestly. And that’s like abstract granted, but I think we need to start with some abstractions if we’re going to move into material strategy.

Vernon: That sounds great. And sign me up. I mean, there’s two ways that we could go here, and I’m conscious of the time, so I don’t want to take up too much of your time. But the issue that we haven’t talked about there are the divisions amongst those who teach at universities. And perhaps, especially the age-old divisions, the old set of craft mentality of so many university professors, feeling as though, often, that they’re not engaged in academic labor, but they are engaged in a sort of vocational educational mission that they wouldn’t be able to ally with graduate students that they work with, let alone undergraduate students that they teach.

What is it that you think has changed over the last 10, 15 years that has meant that those attitudes — we may be beginning to see those attitudes recede? They’re still deeply entrenched. But it does seem that a new generation of professors are arriving with a different set of attitudes.

Wolfson: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, my assessment is that one of the biggest blocks outside of the fact that we’re not organized on most campuses, and where we are organized, we’re organized into all these different unions. I think one of the other biggest blocks has been tenured faculty.

Tenured faculty are the most privileged part of the sector, save the new bureaucratic class, and have, I think, for the most part, really protected their own. And in many ways, as you said, haven’t really recognized themselves as part of a workforce.

I mean, sometimes, I say it and I regret it usually after, but I’ll say it again nonetheless, which is faculty see themselves as a special unicorn, and we’re not. Tenured faculty, I want to say, and articulate. We’re not.

And I think two things are happening. One is younger faculty are coming in with a very— maybe they’ve gone through a grad student unionization campaign. And they have a very different attitude.

But then a second thing that’s important is that even tenure-stream faculty have begun to feel the pressures of the attack on higher ed in new ways, whether it’s the attacks on shared governance, whether it’s attacks on tenure that we’re seeing, and whether it’s attacks on academic freedom, whether it’s new algorithmic scheduling programs that force them to be on campus four days a week when they only had to be on campus three days a week, the semester prior, or whether— any number of things have forced faculty to realize that they’re no longer outside the workforce.

And so I think those two things have created an opening, where faculty, tenured faculty, recognize and are starting to throw their lot in with the rest of the higher ed workforce. And we have to really figure out ways to encourage and pull that process together.

Because for too long, even on unionized campuses, and we could talk about how bad it is on non-union campuses, but even on unionized campuses, where we’re organized by trade — where tenured faculty have a union, adjunct faculty have a union, grad workers have a separate union, professional staff have a separate union, ground staff have a separate union on and on and on — is that management pits pieces of the workforce against each other. And often, siding most with tenured faculty at the behest of the rest of the workforce.

And so the fact that we’re starting to get hip to that and moving into a different alignment is really immeasurably important for the future of the sector. And also, we need to center the most vulnerable on our campuses, whether they’re adjunct faculty or staff or grad workers or international students or people of color or women, et cetera. And so we really need to figure out how to do that. And I think we’re in a moment where it’s a moment of possibility that hasn’t been there prior.

So there’s a real possibility to— we’re not going to be able to be wall to wall on every campus. In the UCs, you already have an amazing staff union. The AMSCME 3299 union — and you have a great union that represents contingent faculty, UC-AFT.

They’re not going to all of a sudden just meld together. But we can approach our— and you also have UAW, forgive me, representing grad workers and postdocs and researchers. All of those are great unions. They’re not going to just meld together. But what we can do is say, we’re going to take an approach that mirrors wall to wall. So we’re going to work together. We’re going to try to go into contract campaigns together. We’re going to maybe strike at the same time. All of that’s a lot of work across multiple different leadership bodies, but I think it’s the way forward.

Vernon: We began this conversation talking about the way in which the political and economic attack on universities began back in the 1970s. And you highlighted the way in which California was at the forefront of that process with Ronald Reagan.

But there’s a way, it seems to me, as though that — both of those streams have intensified since 2007, 2008. There’s been both endless austerity since that moment, which has accelerated disinvestment and led to renewed efforts to commercialize campuses.

And there’s also been a acceleration of the culture wars that place universities as these sort of abominable spaces that teach students about whatever the bogeyman is at that moment, whether it’s critical race theory, gender neutrality, climate change, or now Palestine.

So what do you think has made– why are things so bad at the moment? What is it that– Am I misthinking that things have intensified both economically and politically? Or is it just more of the same? And if it is different, do you have any sense of why that might be the case?

Wolfson: I don’t think it’s more of the same. I think like higher ed, in particular, is particularly under a serious threat at this moment, that at least— I did my undergrad, but then I was out of the academy for a number of years, but then I started my PhD studies around 2000. So I’ve been in the academy for the last 25 years, again, from my grad studies forward. And I’ve never seen a moment where higher ed was under this sort of attack. And attack is not the right word— in this sort of, facing multiple cascading crises, some of them manufactured.

And so I think it’s pretty fair to say that there’s something important and distinct about this moment. There’s others who have done more thinking about this. So I, in some ways, defer. But in my assessment, in many ways, we’re in an economic system that’s having trouble reproducing itself.

And it’s created all sorts of unbounding to the social system, which is created what Gramsci has said is “a time of monsters.” This is like a moment of serious potential barbarism in front of us. And the university is on the front line of it.

And so I think quite clearly, there is a rising tide of fascism. The rising tide of fascism is also coming out of an economic system that’s not working for all of us. And it’s pretty clear and it’s getting worse and worse for all of us.

And people are no longer bound to the elite power structures that exist. And they are looking for answers. And Ron DeSantis is offering them answers, and so is JD Vance and Donald Trump and others. And so I think that we are in a distinct moment.

And I think within this particular cycle, higher ed has become — and could increasingly become, if we look forward, the boogeyman– the boogeyman. And we could imagine a future nine months, six months from now, where we have a–

Vernon: A month from now.

Wolfson: Right. Where we have a Trump-Vance presidency, and we still have a genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. And we have encampments on our campuses and the federal government’s trying to slash funding to universities that aren’t demanding loyalty oaths from faculty around Israel or around God knows what.

And so I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility moving forward. So that’s why I think it’s really incumbent on us to get ourselves organized to figure out how to fight back. But that aside, I think to your point, that’s how I’m reading this moment, which is that there’s a moment of extreme economic distress, which has opened the door for a form of fascism, which is particularly targeted universities.

Vernon: Yeah. I mean, and it re-emphasizes something that was really important for us thinking about this podcast series, which is precisely exploring the relationship of universities to democracies around the world and the twin crises that both are experiencing.

And so it’s going to lead then to my final question, which is basically— and this is a tricky question and it’s a question I suspect that I know the answer that you’re going to give me. But what do you think holds out the most hope of trying to ensure that universities become both more democratic places and help re-energize American democracy?

We’ve got a choice. Is it a choice between the ballot box and how we vote in November? Or is it a question of organizing on our campuses? Or is it both at the same time?

Wolfson: Yeah. That’s a great question. Look, I mean, I’d say, honestly, that what happens in November matters. I mean, I’m not in love with the Democratic Party, but the Republican Party, at this moment, has said— the nominees for the Republican Party have said quite directly, that professors are the enemy.

And they want to emulate Hungary and take all universities under a nonprofit so they can control us. That’s been said by JD Vance in this election cycle. And so while I’m no fan, and I have many of the same concerns people others might have, I think that what happens in November will impact what we organize for and what terrain we’re on moving forward thereafter. And so I think we need to be clear-eyed about that.

But I don’t think what happens in November is ever going to be the answer or elections will ever be the answer for us. The answer is going to be when things are so hard for us and we’re in such dire straits, that we’re willing— or when we put out an imaginary, that we all can align with — that we’re willing to do the hard work of talking to one another and organizing with one another and moving forward, collectively.

We must change how we approach our sector. We are probably one of the weakest sectors of all of the major sectors in this country, industrial, or public sector — that’s K-12 — they’re all so much better organized than us.

And so if we believe in higher education and academy and scholarship, and if we believe in our own research or our teaching, we got to fight to preserve this. And in my mind, that means organizing. And yes, I think labor is the engine here. I think it has to be the engine to save this sector.

But I think first and foremost, we have to organize on every campus, whether we have a union or not. We need to fundamentally figure out what’s going wrong for our colleagues, whether our colleague is a faculty member or a professional staff or any other number of job titles. And we need to figure out how to redress those problems collectively in the face of repression.

And that needs to happen on every campus, in every department, and then we need to scale it up into a national movement. There needs to be a movement for the future of our sector. And the only ones that are going to do it are the workers in our sector, along with our students.

Vernon: That seems an absolutely splendid place to end. So thank you, Todd, so much for that conversation. I had a lot of fun, and I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as I have.

Wolfson: I had a great time, too. Thank you, James. These are great questions. I really appreciate doing this with you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Fragile History of American Democracy

Published November 1, 2024

Episode 1: Understanding Academic Freedom: Interview with Hank Reichman

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, and the introduction of new restrictions on protests at the University of California and at over a 100 campuses across the U.S., our first podcast explores the relationship of free speech and academic freedom to the fragile history of democracy in America over the past century.

James Vernon, Director of the Global Democracy Commons, talks to Hank Reichman, Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay and a former AAUP vice-president who chaired its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure for almost a decade, from 2012-2021. A new edition of his last book, Understanding Academic Freedom, will be out in Spring 2025.

Podcast Transcript

WOMAN’S VOICE: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

JAMES VERNON: Hello, my name is James Vernon. And I’m a Professor of History and Director of the Global Democracy Commons at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome to the first of a new series of podcasts on democracy and the public University.

These podcasts will explore how universities around the world are increasingly being targeted as spaces of debate, critique and protest. We hope our conversations will allow us to understand why universities have become the canary in the coal mine for the fragile state of democracy in so many continents and countries.

And I’m really thrilled today to start this podcast series in conversation with Professor Hank Reichman. Hank is a Professor Emeritus of History at the California State University East Bay. He’s also a former AAUP vice president, and chaired its committee A on academic freedom and tenure for almost a decade between 2012 and 2021.

In the last few years, he’s been busy in retirement and has published no less than two books about academic freedom, The Future of Academic Freedom, that came out in 2019, and two years later, Understanding Academic Freedom, a revised edition of which he’s just finishing up and will be out, hopefully, this coming spring.

It’s a particular pleasure to begin this podcast series with Hank because he received his PhD at Berkeley where he worked with my former and much missed late colleague Reggie Zelnik. Reggie arrived in Berkeley 60 years ago in 1964.

And in his very first semester as a junior, an untenured faculty member, became an active supporter of the free speech movement which had begun that fall 60 years ago this very week. So welcome, Hank, and we should welcome Reggie wherever he is looking down on us for this conversation.

HANK REICHMAN: Thank you, James that very kind welcome. And, yes, I think of Reggie almost every day, particularly in these difficult times.

JAMES VERNON: Indeed. Well, let’s start then with talking about the free speech movement. It seems like the obvious place to start this conversation. It’s an odd time right now to be celebrating its 60th anniversary, when just a few months ago, the University of California set new rules and limits on student protest on campuses.

Like over 100 other campuses across the country, those rules were a response to the protests mainly last spring in support of Gaza. And they’ve sought to do various things like outlaw encampments, the use of face masks, as well as introducing new time and place restrictions with the threat of arrest and suspension to students. In this context, I’m wondering how we should think about the legacies or the importance of the free speech movement at Berkeley.

HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think, James, one aspects of the free speech movement is how near it was in time to the McCarthy era. In 1964, the University of California at Berkeley was still recovering from the loyalty oath controversy of the early and mid 1950s.

And even though students, of course, coming on campus were already not of that generation, most of the faculty and the administration and even some of the older students were still working under the legacy of those times and the fears that accompanied them.

And for many people, the response to the McCarthy era is not dissimilar, I think, to the response of some administrators and probably more than a few faculty members today, which is maybe we should sacrifice the broader ability of faculty and students to speak out as citizens in order to retain and protect the most important elements of academic freedom, the freedom and research and in the classroom and in teaching.

And what the free speech movement did was to throw cold water on that notion that somehow you could have academic freedom in the laboratory, the library, the classroom, but not have it on the quad and in the streets.

And free speech movement sought to extend principles of free speech to political activism by students that was not necessarily part of their formal education. What I would argue, and I think many faculty members would argue, was an important and remains to this day a very important part of the holistic college experience of what it means to be an educated person.

And, indeed, universities not only provide formal training and education and research facilities, et cetera, but we also provide an environment in which young people in particular, but also ourselves, the faculty and staff, can exercise their rights in an environment that is, by its very definition, perhaps the most conducive to diverse and even dangerous thinking. Without fear of the kind of repression that might happen in a corporation in other places of work, in a shopping mall or what have you.

JAMES VERNON: Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we’re both historians that this being the 60th year, it reminds us in some ways how short the history of free speech on university campuses has been.

HANK REICHMAN: Yes, that’s true. That’s definitely true. And even, in fact, we think about academic freedom, which did not initially encompass this kind of broad sense of free speech for students, although I think the founders of the AAUP back in the early 20th century who first articulated most clearly the principles of American academic freedom.

I think they would have been sympathetic. And, indeed, they were themselves mainly political progressives. Nonetheless, I think the scope of what we have come to envision as appropriate for a contemporary university campus since the 1960s, arguably first emerges some places in the 1930s.

JAMES VERNON: Can we talk about that a little bit because it’s really interesting to think about the free speech movement as, in some ways, a product of the McCarthyite era. And it’s equally interesting to think about the principle of academic freedom being articulated in a moment in the 1920s and the 1930s by the founders of the AAUP at a time when fascism seemed to be very present in Europe and not exactly absent in the United States. So could you say a little bit more about the context in which the AAUP was founded and why academic freedom was such an important principle to be articulated at that moment?

HANK REICHMAN: Well, actually the AAUP is founded a bit before that. It was founded in 1915. And in its first year it produced a document that I would argue is still, to this day– despite some archaic language and a little the kind of whiff of elitism that came from these professors, all of whom were an elite, mainly private universities– still is, I think, the best single document articulating the principles of American academic freedom.

I mean, it’s obviously been expanded upon and developed over the years. And they were responding, of course, not just to issues of academic freedom, but they were, as I’ve argued elsewhere, they were motivated by two complementary, but in some respects, contradictory elements.

One was professionalism. They desired– as many people in the Progressive Era did, doctors, attorneys, et cetera– to define the rights of a profession. And they saw academia, not just any particular discipline, but scholarship as a whole, as a profession in the same way that medicine, for example, is a profession.

And in medicine, we don’t say that legislatures should determine what makes a good doctor. Doctors should determine that, people educated in medicine. And the same thing for professors. And that’s what they were fighting for, professional autonomy. At the same time, they were also political progressives. And this was the Progressive Era, the time when we got popular election of senators, when the income tax was adopted.

And they saw the universities as contributing to the progress of democracy and wanted to see that strengthened. Now, the interesting thing is that it was immediately challenged within a couple of years by American entry into World War 1. And, in fact, the AAUP, particularly while– put it nicely, they dropped the ball. I mean, they basically most of their leaders– not all, but most of their leaders just joined in the patriotic enthusiasms, willing to silence faculty members who disagreed.

Most notably, a Columbia professor at the time, James McKeen Cattell, who was one of the founders of the AAUP and was fired for his anti-war activism, prompting, by the way, Charles Beard to resign, et cetera. So that was their push.

When in the 1930s, as you say, fascism began to develop, the AAUP and many others sought allies and sought to strengthen the Democratic element in universities. And they allied at the time with the Association of American Colleges, which at the time represented mainly small private institutions. But once again, it was their desire to strengthen both democracy and progress and professionalism.

That was behind it because in the 1930s, the academic profession was in terrible shape. I mean, very few people were tenured. The tenure system had only taken off at a handful of elite schools, and even there was quite limited.

And faculty members were there, there was depression, their salaries were going down, et cetera. They had little power. And so the AUP then sought, once again, to ally their professional interest with political progressivism.

And I think that’s kind of a major lesson about American academic freedom is not to say that academic freedom can’t or shouldn’t protect conservative and even anti-progressive voices among the faculty. It definitely should.

And indeed, there have been conservative leaders in the AUP over the years. But I think the sentiment of American academic freedom has often been shaped by this kind of dual thrust of on the one hand, attempting to define a profession, but on the other hand, aiming for progress and serving democracy. And that comes, I think, ultimately from the justification of academic freedom.

It’s not just a professional right because we know better and others don’t, but because the whole raison d’etre of our profession, similarly to the profession of being a doctor, is to serve. And in our case, to serve a democratic society by providing informed opinion, informed research, and informed citizens.

JAMES VERNON: Wonderful. That’s a wonderful demonstration of the way in which academic freedom and indeed free speech, where the free speech movement, are intricately connected to the history of American democracy and the way in which university professors see the university as a key instrument of helping to build democratic life in the United States in different types of ways.

And I think sometimes we think of academic freedom as a technical issue, which is divorced from those wider contexts. So I’m very grateful for you reminding us of that important longer history of the principle of academic freedom. I want to move on.

I want to actually just come back to the University of California again because as you know, last month the faculty associations at the University of California filed a unprecedented unfair labor practice complaint against the Uc system for interfering with faculties’ protected rights to academic freedom and free speech, particularly in regards to the question of Palestine and the war on Gaza.

Now, that complaint accused the University of California of three things, of threatening to discipline faculty who supported student encampments. Indeed, we saw some faculty arrested for their roles at student and campus encampments. Using their classrooms to do teaching or to encourage students to join protests.

And prohibiting faculty from speaking to students and graduate students or, indeed, other faculty about the strike that the graduate Student Union, the UAW, had called for as an unfair labor practice because it felt the academic freedom of its members had been infringed by the university for their involvement in supporting protests about Gaza.

So it appears as though the Uc regents and the university leaders across the system issued some of those directives because they seem sympathetic to an idea of institutional neutrality. And this is a term that we’re hearing more and more about in the last year.

So I’m wondering whether you can say a little about what you think is meant when university leaders invoke the term institutional neutrality. Some faculty are also very supportive of this idea. And then perhaps we can begin to explain how that idea is being used to set new limits on ideas of academic freedom or free speech on campuses.

HANK REICHMAN: Well, let me preface my remarks by institutional neutrality to say something really quickly about that ULP because I had the distinct honor and pleasure of speaking at a press conference at UCLA when announcing the filing of the ULP.

And I think it is– I really want to compliment the faculty associations and the Uc for taking this initiative. I’ve actually read the entire ULP– well, 55 pages. I did not read the full 581 pages with all the exhibits– and it’s really an impressive piece of work. So I wanted to make that clear. As the institutional neutrality, can you–

JAMES VERNON: Just before we get on to institutional neutrality, it’s maybe worth emphasizing what a dramatic thing it is for faculty associations and for people not as familiar with the University of California system. We should preface this by saying that faculty at the University of California have no union, but they have faculty associations that seek to protect the rights and interests of faculty.

And many of those faculty associations are allied with the AAUP. But usually faculty have never ever before filed a complaint against their employers for infringing their protected rights to academic freedom and freedom of speech. So it is a really historic moment. It’s a sign of where we’re at, I think, on university campuses.

HANK REICHMAN: I certainly agree. I certainly think so. I want to just– a little correction here is that not all Uc faculty don’t have a union. Remember, about something like 40% of the Uc faculty are not on the tenure track. They’re not so-called senate faculty, and they are represented by the AFT.

JAMES VERNON: And we will come back to the question of tenure and who gets it and who does not.

HANK REICHMAN: Yeah. But anyway, yes, no, I do think this is– it is a major step. And in particular because it speaks not to– people think of unions or even non-union or union-like organizations, like the faculty association, using what is essentially labor of the higher education employer-employee relations act. They see that mainly for economic reasons.

And what is important here is this is on basic principles of free speech and academic freedom in defense not only of the faculty’s rights, but objectively of the students’ rights. And I thought it was a very bold and courageous move, whatever the result may be.

Turning now back to institutional neutrality, I think this is a perfect example of an idea that has a kernel of truth to it, important kernel of truth, but can be used and abused by various interests. The kernel of truth is this, universities are not in the business of taking positions on issues of academic controversy.

They are neither there to defend or critique the ideas advanced by any of their faculty members. What they are there to do as an institution is to defend the right of their faculty members, to advance ideas no matter how controversial. And leave it to the faculty to decide for themselves, according to their discipline, what is a legitimate academic scholarly idea and what fails the tests of scholarship.

So, for instance, in principle, if a university president is asked, what is the university’s position on well, let’s say climate change? Is our climate changing and what is causing it? The university could very simply say the university has no formal position, but all our scientists in that field agree that the climate is changing and human activity is behind it.

And if there is a dissenting scientist on the faculty who believes differently, the university can defend that person’s right to do that as well. That’s where the principle should apply. In fact, the calls we are hearing now for institutional neutrality are not so much about that.

Because, in fact, a university that really does defend the academic freedom of its faculty members in research and teaching, no matter what their positions may be, should and then feel freer to take its own positions where the university is by its definition required to take a position. Because actually, when we think about this question of neutrality, it’s constantly talking about the University can’t take formal positions. What is a formal position?

A formal position is a statement. But, in fact, as the old saying goes, actions often speak louder than words. And, indeed, the university, by its very existence, is compelled to take actions that are not neutral. When students demonstrate on campus, the university is compelled to take actions on how to deal with that demonstration. Should the demonstration become disruptive, become violent? What have you? And it has to be able to do that.

Now, in doing that, it is taking a position. Now, what kind of position is important? Is it a position defending the free speech of the demonstrators insofar as they are not unduly– and unduly is, of course, a matter of interpretation– restricting the free speech rights or endangering the lives or safety of those others on campus?

They must make a decision about that. I would argue, of course, that in doing so, it’s difficult. Another point about neutrality is the university can’t be neutral when the University itself is the subject of the political attacks.

And, indeed, this is what we’re seeing now. And this goes back to the McCarthy era. Remember, I was saying that one of the tendencies of many faculty members, and certainly of the university administration, back in the early 1960s was if we keep all this political controversy off campus, we will be able– and make ourselves look like we’re not involved in politics– we will be able to defend what’s really important, the rights of faculty members and students in research and teaching.

And there’s something to that. That’s exactly what we’re hearing today about institutional neutrality. But it isn’t neutral because the attack is on the university as, indeed, a political actor. So, for example, the attacks on so-called DEI, Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion initiatives, which are designed– sometimes well designed, sometimes poorly designed– to make the university more open to a variety of people and hence a variety of viewpoints.

The attacks on those are attacks on the basic structure of what is the university about. Is it a Democratic institution or is it an institution designed to serve only the privileged, only the wealthy, only whatever group you want.

So I think we have to be very careful about this institutional neutrality. I understand why many faculty members believe that it will protect us from political attack. But, in fact, it also can be a Trojan Horse for itself being a political attack. And, indeed, that’s what I think it has become in many universities, including, I fear, at the University of California.

JAMES VERNON: Yeah, I mean, there is a particular irony that many of the new rules about student protest that have been passed on so many campuses across the United States. One important component of them ask for the permitting of protests against the university by the university itself.

Of course, the other element of this, which has also been around for a while but we’re hearing much more about it in recent years has been what is sometimes called the principles of civility and community that are written into university regulations that students and faculty are meant to follow.

Do you think that’s coming from a different place? Do you think that saying that free speech in particular has to be modified by being– ensuring that all members of the community are equally respected or that the forms of debate and engagement follow the prescriptions of civility are coming from a place, again, of trying to find almost a neutral spot on campus life?

HANK REICHMAN: Well, look, I think universities and university faculty members in particular, have a professional obligation to model for our students and for the society reasoned debate. The question is not being civil, although reasoned debate usually can be conducted best when people are acting civilly to each other and not cursing each other or engaging in violence, et cetera.

But sometimes the term civility is used basically, don’t be passionate. And there’s a lot of things, unfortunately, to be passionate about in the world. So I think we have to model reasoned debate and discussion. And one of the great failures of universities over the last year has been that in increasingly resorting to repression or regulation rather than encouraging reasoned discussion.

I mean, think of how many great teachings could have been done from multiple points of view about the Gaza war instead of just putting out all these new time, place, manner restrictions, et cetera. So I think that that’s the obligation we have. But if civility is going to be used as a club to keep people from speaking their minds– and let’s remember, students are students. They’re young, they’re here to learn. And, frankly, you can’t learn unless you make mistakes.

And so students in their expression are going to make mistakes, and that’s part of the learning. I mean, heck, when I was a student, I was a political activist. And looking back on it, there’s a lot of things I did I would never consider doing today, but I’m no longer 20 years old. And so we need to be tolerant of that. We need to provide not repression but guidance. And the guidance is not lecturing people on, be civil. It’s modeling reasoned debate, providing guidelines, et cetera.

And so that’s what I think is called for. And the other element of it, this thing that speech that makes other people uncomfortable. Speech can endanger other people. There is a difference between harassment and just simply saying something that people don’t want to hear. And a lot of that is contextual.

Somebody who says that Israel should be driven into the sea, if they say that in the context of debate in class, yes, it may be an anti-Semitic comment but it is in part of a discussion and needs to be addressed. And if it makes some students uncomfortable, then that has to be dealt with.

But if someone paints it on the windows or walls of a synagogue, that’s harassment. That’s not protected by speech. And the boundaries aren’t, of course, as in anything else, they’re never entirely clear, but they can be drawn by reasonable people.

And so I think the thing is that we always and certainly– this is an obligation for faculty members in the classroom– we always must be respectful for students as individuals, but we don’t have to show respect for ideas that we know do not pass the test of our disciplines.

JAMES VERNON: Great. We’ve been talking a lot about some of the historical parallels of the past to the present and some of the ways in which current developments have echoes of the past. And it’s certainly been the case that for all of our lives universities have always been at the center of various types of culture wars, that universities have always been at the center of various forms of debate.

And we’ve talked about the free speech movement but we probably both remember the debates around political correctness in the 1980s and we both been around the– debates around critical race theory and gender neutrality, and now Israel-Palestine.

So I guess my question is, are we seeing just history repeating itself here in new terms or do you see that there’s something new about what’s been going on in the last few years? And I don’t want to imply that this is simply a consequence of the war on Gaza because it seems to be more about the political climate of the United States and the way in which that’s changed over the past decade.

But to me, at least, there seems something novel going on when you’re having congressional hearings of university leaders and you have the proliferation of various types of campus watchdogs and increasingly interventionist regents and donors trying to influence university leaders and faculty. Do you think I’m being alarmist or do you also share my sense that we’re witnessing an intensification of these concerns– of the ways in which universities are positioned within culture wars?

HANK REICHMAN: Well, I wish, James, I could say you were being alarmist, but I don’t think you are. I tend to agree with you. Marxists have the old phrase, the dialectic works by quantity, sometimes turns into quality. That a small quantitative changes ultimately result in a whole qualitative change.

And I think something like that is what we’ve seen. In, you mentioned, introducing me, if I can be crass and make a plug for myself, that my book, Understanding Academic Freedom, I’ve completed a second edition that– the publication date, by the way, is March 25– and it’s all been proof read. I can’t make any more changes and et cetera.

And in there I add a whole section into the introduction called the crisis of academic freedom because when I first wrote that book in 2021, I thought, well, this will last for maybe a decade as a kind of a good introduction to academic freedom that faculty members can use and other people as well. And suddenly I realized that the events of the past few years had changed things dramatically, and it needed already a new edition.

And the reason was is I think I tried to articulate that in the book. I came up with the notion that we have entered what I call the crisis of academic freedom, which I argue or could argue much more thoroughly in another context, is the worst crisis for academic freedom in our modern history, certainly since the founding of the AAUP in the beginning of the 20th century.

Worse still than the McCarthy era. Because in the McCarthy era this was– the forces behind Senator McCarthy, et cetera, they’re real. They were not attacking higher education or education per se, they were attacking liberalism and they were, by and large, losing even given the damage they were doing, including to higher education. I think now that attack– and it’s not an accident that Donald Trump is a pupil, shall we say, of Roy Cohn’s– and that attack is now far more powerful than it was back in the 1950s.

And I would argue– and we’ll get to this in a few because I know what your next– where you want to move the conversation– and the universities I think are arguably in a weaker position as institutions to defend themselves, especially– and since, in fact, the attack is not only on the universities, it’s on k-12 education, it’s on major groups of the population, it’s on the rights of women, et cetera.

It’s a broad-based assault so I don’t think you’re being alarmist. I do think what we’re seeing now is a really dangerous moment certainly in higher education. And it’s not at all clear to me, unfortunately, that we will survive it in the sense that universities aren’t going to disappear. But universities as the kinds of agents for democratic change and knowledge development that we have seen in the past will be, if not nonexistent, certainly greatly kneecapped, shall we say.

JAMES VERNON: Yeah. OK, so let’s– we’ve been talking almost exclusively about the nature of free speech and academic freedom in relationship to the state of American democracy. And so I want to move that conversation on, as you’ve already indicated, to thinking about how academic and free speech is also derived and shaped by the changing economic conditions that universities operate in.

And it’s often been suggested that the levels of state disinvestment that we’ve seen from public universities, which began in the 1970s, most infamously by Ronald Reagan in California wanting to sort out the mess of student protests at Berkeley, that withdrawing the state funding from public universities was a way of trying to discipline protesting students and faculty.

And particularly it’s also been suggested that state disinvestment coincided not accidentally with the very decades when the student population was increasingly no longer majority white. So one of the arguments that’s often made about the perilous position of academic freedom and free speech on universities is that after now half a century of state disinvestment, university leaders are so desperate to attract new types of commercial or philanthropic income that they don’t want to alienate investors or donors. And so, therefore, embrace this new rhetoric of institutional neutrality.

So do you think that the economic conditions that state disinvestment has led has created a particularly fertile environment for trying to prohibit or prescribe the forms of academic freedom and free speech on university campuses?

HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think it certainly has in the– although it should be noted that state investment, particularly at federal and state government investment in the universities, is not without its restrictions on freedom, et cetera.

I mean, for example, I mean, the great increase in federal investment in higher education in the 1950s and ’60s, much of it went to fund research for the military industrial complex that itself violated principles of academic freedom by being secret.

So I think we should– the other thing is I don’t think we should idealize the notion of what– well, let me put it this way, I don’t think we should assume that the conditions of the three postwar decades, from 1945 to 1975, were typical of the history of higher education in the United States or anywhere. This was a period of remarkable expansion in American higher education, yet even then universities were often felt themselves compelled to strive for new sources of funding, state budgets were limited.

There’s a very interesting book I read, just came out about two years ago or three years ago, about the University of Illinois, about two controversies in the 1960s around the academic freedom there. One of which was the Leo Koch controversy, a young faculty member biologist who was fired for his statements in support of pre-marital sex, which you would think from today’s vantage point is like, huh?

But it was a very big and very important case in the AUP’s history. This is in 1964. And a lot of it was because the president was desperately afraid that the legislature was going to cut off funding for expansion for the University of Illinois. So even in the flush times this was the case. But I do think, obviously, universities are in many ways now vulnerable in new ways, certainly, to private interference.

And even this is even more true now of private universities because in the 1960s, say, a private university, say, Columbia or Harvard, was getting a lot of its funding from the federal government. So in that sense had become almost– what’s the opposite of privatized? I don’t know.

But whereas now both private and public institutions are increasingly relying on corporate donations, so-called public-private partnerships, et cetera, which gives donors private interests, corporations, perhaps more say than they might have a couple of decades ago in university affairs.

JAMES VERNON: Including, of course, in what types of faculty are actually hired in which areas of academic study, which has a powerful relationship to what’s taught in the classroom and what is said and not said on university campuses.

HANK REICHMAN: Exactly. And that is a new development. That is something that in the past neither the state nor the private donors could say which faculty we want you to hire. I mean, the state can always say to a public university, Berkeley doesn’t have a medical school because there’s one in San Francisco. And they won’t let you start one even if you want one. That’s their right.

And it’s their right to tell the Cal States that they can’t offer a PhD or have a law school. But who’s going to be hired in the political science department? Who’s going to be hired to do climate studies is not– it’s something that the university itself and hopefully within the university, mainly the faculty and the relevant faculty get to decide.

And that has always been the case until recently with these donations and grants, and now some of them coming from state governments as well earmarked to hire a particular kind of faculty member in a particular kind of way, irrespective of what the qualified faculty members on the campus believe. And that is very, very troubling.

JAMES VERNON: I want to close out with a last question. Although as I’m thinking about it, I’m realizing that we probably should have made time to talk about the way in which the rising levels of student debt also sometimes forms a constraint upon the activities of students and the abilities of students to fully participate in the sort of civic life of university campuses.

But I want to focus on faculty and this question of academic freedom because the other way that people talk about the erosion of academic freedom on university campuses as being rooted in economic conditions is the ways in which faculty on universities, the labor force of faculty on universities have changed quite dramatically over the last two decades.

And you touched on this earlier, talking about the important distinction between tenured faculty and untenured faculty. And we’re now in a position where a ridiculous percentage of teaching faculty at public universities, around 70% across the country are untenured because they’re cheaper to hire and they’re easier to fire than tenured faculty.

So can you say something about why tenure is so important to the protection of academic freedom. Because so often in the news we hear tenure being represented as a type of sinecure for academics, that we’re the last profession to have a job for life, and that, to many people, seems wrong.

So can you explain why the institution of tenure is so important to the practice of academic freedom, and why so many of us are worried about the casualization of teaching within higher education and the growth of untenured– the size of the untenured population of teaching faculty.

HANK REICHMAN: Well, I think the first thing to emphasize is what tenure is and what it isn’t. It isn’t a guarantee of lifetime employment. What it is a guarantee that after a suitable probationary period in which you can be dismissed, faculty member who has proven her or his qualification as a researcher or teacher, depending upon– and teacher, depending upon what the job is, that person has the presumption of reappointment.

That they will be reappointed and can only be dismissed under a couple of conditions, but the most important one is for cause. And cause determined after a due process evidentiary hearing, before an elected body of faculty members, with the university having the obligation to prove that the person– there is cause.

Now, what is the cause? There are obvious things. Just not doing the job is the obvious one. Conduct completely inappropriate for the profession, sexual harassment, for example. There are a number of other things. Different institutions will define it differently. The AUP has made clear, however, that it shouldn’t be simply bad performance evaluations or it shouldn’t just be not being a team player or any of that kind of stuff.

And, indeed, tenured faculty members are all the time dismissed for cause after such due process. Although more often than not, what happens is when a due process is initiated, the faculty member may choose to retire or leave voluntarily, but the effect is the same.

So that’s what not– that’s what tenure is. The problem, of course, and the reason for that is that that system does two things. First, it protects the individual faculty member from being dismissed because his or her views have become controversial or they’ve been criticized, et cetera, et cetera, for whatever reason, from violation of their academic freedom.

The second is important too is that if there are enough tenured faculty members who feel secure enough in their job, that they can speak out in defense of a colleague who is being disciplined, then that strengthens the academic freedom of everyone, including the non-tenured.

And now in the point where only a minority of the faculty are tenured and the great majority have no access to tenured– they’re not even probationary– the ability of the tenured faculty to defend not only their untenured colleagues but themselves is greatly, greatly weakened.

And I think one of the things to point out about people who are hired on term contracts, often as short as one quarter or one semester, those people can be dismissed by simply non-renewal of their contract.

And one of the most interesting cases we had in the AAUP was a completely untenured philosophy instructor at a Colorado community college who criticized a new curriculum that was being imposed upon him. He agreed to teach it because it was his job, but he voiced criticism of it. And they fired him immediately because they said he was a terrible teacher. There was no evidence of it, by the way.

Now, this was interesting because he gave the AAUP the opportunity to investigate, and we condemned this and put them on our censure list, but the investigating committee pointed out that a more clever administration might have simply just kept their mouths shut and at the end of the semester just simply said, we don’t need you anymore.

Even though this guy, by the way, had been teaching for multiple semesters and had glowing student evaluations and glowing peer evaluations up until that very moment, but they could have just simply– and who knows how many cases there are in which a faculty member is being non-renewed for the simple being told– not being told a reason, no one’s told a reason, but the reason is he insulted the dean. Somebody complained, a legislator intervened, a trustee intervened.

JAMES VERNON: I’m glad that we began by remembering Reggie in his first semester as an untenured colleague taking part in the free speech movement because it should not be underestimated how intimidating and how fearful so many of my untenured colleagues are to take part in the civic life of the campus these days.

And so, yeah, I recall that example not as a call to arms to my junior colleagues, because I think they’re not even on the tenure track. They’re in a much, much more precarious position than even Reggie was back in 1964.

And I don’t know whether you have any final thoughts on how we might try and restore the institution of tenure or improve the ways in which even those on the tenure track can help protect the practices and principles of academic freedom and free speech on campus in the types of political and economic conditions that we currently work in.

HANK REICHMAN: Well, one of the things we’ve seen, of course, is particularly among untenured faculty, but among where they’re allowed to tenured faculty as well has been the growing movement to organize unions and to unionize. And unions are not the answer to all the problems. There are strong unions, weak unions, good contracts, poor contracts, et cetera.

But is one way of at least protecting some level of due process, if not the full tenure abilities. And, indeed, some contracts have adopted procedures for people who technically and formally, according to the university, do not have tenure, but, in fact, are guaranteed what I just talked about before after a certain amount of years. And the AAUP in private we’ve sometimes called that tenure light, that its tenure in all but name, and those are things we can win for people. But, ultimately, I think we need to try to revitalize the tenure system.

And the one optimistic thing I have to say about that is the situation we face now with respect to tenure and contingency in the faculty is pretty much the same as the situation faced by our colleagues in the late 1930s when the AAUP and the AUC began work on the 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. And their efforts led ultimately in the post years to an explosion of the tenure system. And so our context is different but there is a part of me that says, well, if they did it before, we can do it again.

JAMES VERNON: Yeah, we have to rebuild higher education and we have to rebuild the fabric of democracy in the United States through– in part through our universities. And that seems like a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much, Hank, for a fascinating conversation. It’s been a complete delight to start this podcast series talking with you.

HANK REICHMAN: Enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much for having me, James. And it really is something of an honor to be your guest on the first of this, what looks like it’s going to be a terrific series of podcasts.

JAMES VERNON: Great. Thanks so much.

WOMAN’S VOICE: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Prisoner Labor Legacies: An interview with Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc

Published September 27, 2024

While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a 2023-2024 Research Team at Social Science Matrix.

Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc

Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina’s history of convict labor, and shows how incarcerated labor shaped (and in turn, was shaped by) the state’s highway systems, landscapes, and scenic tourism industries in the early decades of the 20th century.

Xander Lenc is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley’s Geography Department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns—and their problems—from other economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. In doing so, he argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography.

Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is included below.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m Julia Sizek, your host. We’re recording today in the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio, and our guests are Xander Lenc and Elizabeth Hargrett. Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s history department and holds a Master’s degree in history from EHESS, in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina’s history of convict labor and shows how carceral networks shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the state’s highway systems, scenic tourism industries, and landscapes in the early decades of the 20th century. Xander Lenc is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s geography department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns and their problems from economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. He argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography. Welcome to the Matrix Podcast.

Elizabeth Hargrett: Thank you so much for having us, Julia.

Xander Lenc: Thank you, Julia.

Sizek: So let’s get started by understanding how prisoners become laborers. And what are the kinds of work that prisoners often end up doing in the United States and elsewhere?

Lenc: That’s a great question. I would say that, ironically, something that we might call “convict labor” or “prisoner labor” preexists anything that we would call the prison itself. You can look back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, in particular, where the worst punishment wasn’t incarceration, it was being condemned to the mines. People often wouldn’t live more than six months to a year in hard labor. In the United States, similarly, indentured servitude, or penal transportation, preexisted the modern penitentiary, and was in many ways a major source of a lot of early colonization.

Before Eastern State Penitentiary, which is usually considered the first modern penitentiary in Philadelphia, it was common to use work gangs, etc. They were experimenting with all of these different styles of punishing people through committing them to labor, sometimes in public. The goal of the prison originally was partially to remove them from the public eye, and to make sure that the exposure to criminality in public would not move into the public itself through sympathy, because the public was often very sympathetic towards these work gangs. And the thought was that maybe criminality is this infectious substance that can move from the prisoner visually into a random housewife walking down the street.

One thing that I think is very common is that prisoners are chosen to do the labor that is hardest to find laborers to do. That’s often hard labor. It’s often, I would argue, related to mines or subterranean space; it’s often very dangerous, in spaces that are dark or disease-ridden. And in many cases, it’s infrastructural. It’s not simply an industrial mode of production, where you have a product that is going to be sold on the market, although there are experiments in this as well. But very frequently, it’s about, over time, compromises in the United States between capital and labor lead to opposition to products being sold on the open market. No one really likes that, because it depresses wages or depresses profits, and no one likes to compete with that. And laws are passed that make it much more common for the state to be the main consumer of anything that has been produced by prisoner labor. And one of the common outcomes of that is that producing infrastructure.

Hargrett: So, yeah, that’s a big question, and Xander answered it beautifully. So in the case of North Carolina, I think there are a series of laws that really worked to answer this question. In 1831, before the Civil War, there was a law that passed that said that the county sheriff could hire out to any person who would pay the fine, a free Black person or free person of color, who had failed to pay a debt. And then in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation, you may be familiar with the Black Codes, which was a series of sweeping laws that were passed across the states of the South that were passed with the aim to secure a compliant labor force in the wake of emancipation. These [Black Codes] criminalized [Blacks] serving on a jury, testifying against whites in court, it restricted the movement in and out of the state of free Black people, etc.

So that same year that the North Carolina Black Codes were passed, in 1866, the first law permitting the use of convict labor on county roads was passed. It was a very ad hoc practice at this point. There was no regulated system of governance around this. But that opened up the use of convict labor on county roads. With the erection of the penitentiary in 1870, convict labor was used to quarry the stone that would build the prison, and then in the actual construction of it. And any kind of prison labor that happened in the following decades, up until the expansion of the railroad system in North Carolina, was mostly manufacturing within the prison, so blacksmithing, carpentry, brick masonry, etc.

In 1872, however, a very important law was passed that legalized the leasing of convicts to railroads and private corporations, specifically a number of railroad companies that had started to build in North Carolina. And with regard to road building, as I said in 1866, that was the first law permitting the use of convict labor on county roads was used, but there was no law that treated any kind of organized system of county road labor until the Mecklenburg Law of 1885. That only applied to three counties at the time. But it was basically a template for the 1899 Road Law that would make it legal to use the labor of anyone who had been sentenced to 10 years or less.

So there are a lot of details I could have added in there, and that’s because the system of convict labor in general in North Carolina, as Alex Lichtenstein [NOTE: speaker meant to say Matthew J. Mancini] has said, has always devolved to the counties. So there were certain counties that would only employ the labor of people who had been sentenced to one year or less, others two years or less. Some actually passed laws that expanded it to anyone who had been sentenced for up to 20 years, etc. But those are, I think, the major legislative milestones that defined who, which prisoners were also laborers in North Carolina.

Sizek: Yeah, so both of you have pointed out that prisoners are used for very specific forms of labor. They aren’t just participating in normal sort of what we might call now capitalist industries. What is distinctive about prisoner labor? And what are the forms of labor that they are undertaking in comparison to private industries, or in comparison to competing government programs, like we might think about the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s?

Lenc: With prisoner labor, I think it’s important to emphasize that pretty much everything has been tried at one point. Penology in the United States was always sort of a very experimental frontier. And oftentimes, it was even left up to wardens to just try and figure things out. At certain points, where prisons were often being managed by private contractors, there was not necessarily a lot of oversight, depending on the time period – this changes over time – for what they’re expected to do. It’s sort of like an hacienda system or something, where they are given a grant to oversee this prison, and in exchange, they can do whatever they see fit to do to make money and make a profit off of the people they’re given dominion over. It is much more like buying slaves. In some cases, like in the Deep South coming out of reconstruction, a lot of people make arguments about whether or not there’s a pretty direct continuity from slavery. But it’s true that also this is very upsetting. If you are someone who employs wage labor, then you are not going to be very fond of your competitor not having to pay wages, because prisoners — or paying very little, as is the case today. And similarly, laborers in rival unions in that trade are not going to be happy that there are other laborers who have a wage of zero.

So over time, there’s a lot of political pressure to stem how much competition there is in the market for anything that is produced from a prison industry. And in most states, this is restricted pretty quickly in the 19th century, as this practice develops, and as penitentiaries proliferated across. And where I study, in the West, there are, however, some important exceptions that ended up getting made. After the transcontinental railroad is finished, there are suddenly a lot of unemployed Chinese men who are entering new industries. And this helps fuel a white supremacist labor movement. The most prominent organization of this is the California Workingmen’s Party, and they have a very nativist, white supremacist, labor-oriented ideology that is very influential in politics. They’re very successful at the California constitutional convention, and implement a number of anti-Chinese and also a number of anti-prison labor platforms. However, they do start to strategize to figure out how you can leverage prisoner labor to specifically target industries where Chinese workers were entering. Sometimes, in some cases, prisoner labor was targeted to reorganize the labor market specifically to hurt certain workers by the primarily white labor movement at the time in California.

Right now, I’m working on a history of Folsom State Prison, in California. And one of the benefits for the boosters at least is that they claimed that the quarry that prisoners could work there would compete with other quarries that were employing Chinese laborers in Northern California at the time. And their hope was to eventually depress Chinese wages enough that it would be impossible to survive as a Chinese man in California, and people would leave. This was part of an explicitly white supremacist movement that was emerging at the time. And it is not really clear that it worked very well.

However, it did lead to some other union busting. And also, white union workers ended up being impacted. For example, as they’re building the state capitol, which is buying granite from the Folsom quarry, union workers who were opposed to any sort of prison labor products refused to work. And the state said, “I’m sorry, but the law requires us to buy our own products, so I guess we can’t use union labor. We would love to, but we’re not going to be able to do that.” So it did really end up backfiring for white supremacist labor organizers at the time, I would argue. And you see this in a couple of other cases. It does not seem — and part of the problem is that it is not necessarily true that quarries were exclusively being worked by Chinese laborers, and the failure to recognize that there are white laborers in these industries too also made this white supremacist movement falter. It was really inconsistent in the actual demographics of the labor market at the time.

Hargrett: So in the case of the road building in North Carolina, initially, labor competition wasn’t an issue at all, mainly because of their statute road labor system, in which roads were built and maintained — mostly maintained, these dirt roads across the state — by citizens in lieu of a road tax system. However, this system became less and less efficient. When there was this shift to convict labor, that is when organized labor, in particular the [North Carolina] State Federation of Labor, came to see convict labor as a threat. And consistently, from the 1900s well into the 1930s, which is the period that I’m looking at, and probably well beyond, pushed back against the use of convict labor on roads, often calling for its abolition. For the railroads, from the 1870s, the reduced cost of using convict labor instead of free labor did pose a threat to free labor, and that was absolutely a concern of organized labor in the 1870s and beyond.

Lenc: I would emphasize, too, that, if anything, one of the primary objective products of prison labor programs, from the point of view of wardens, is a well-disciplined prisoner. Even if it cost more money to operate these programs, oftentimes wardens still would desire to have them, because the fear was that prisoners who don’t have anything to do all day are more likely to riot, to misbehave, not to listen. And if you are committing them to hard labor, then there’s a familiar factory disciplinary system that you can adopt. You don’t have the wage system that you can use to discipline workers, but there’s a familiar sort of product. It was seen very genuinely by some wardens as — who have adopted this Protestant work ethic ideology — as a way that you can rehabilitate someone, by committing them to work. And the problem with prisoners is they had never worked before, which of course was very rarely true, I would argue, but this was a sincerely held belief. So even if money was not successfully pouring in, very frequently there was still a desire to commit people to work. Work is an ideology, and not just a source of income, for many of these prisons.

Hargrett: Right. And with regard to competition, if we’re thinking about the time period in which, for example, the North Carolina State Penitentiary was built, one of the main goals of a lot of these penitentiaries was just to have a self-sustaining prison. And a lot of the work that was being done in these prisons was toward that aim. So as I talked about before, there was blacksmithing, quarrying, etc., and it all kind of funneled back into the prison. Any manufacturing that was being done at the time in the late 19th century didn’t necessarily, at least in the case of North Carolina, pose any threats.

And it seems like in the 1910s, 20s, 30s and beyond, once convict labor began to be seriously used in public roadwork, that organized labor would argue for that return to a convict labor force that served – that worked only in service of the state. For example, the president of the State Federation of Labor in 1930 again argued for the complete abolition of the leasing of convicts to private corporations, and suggested enlarging firms to provide prison work, diverting employment to reforestation projects, upkeep of game preserves, etc. — anything used in connection with the state.

Sizek: So this is interesting, because you’re both raising this problem of needing to do something with these laborers and with people who are convicted of crimes. And what they end up doing is they end up focusing on infrastructure, a lot of the time – both of you have raised this point. How and why did you all choose to focus on this aspect of the carceral system? Because this not often an association made between prisons and infrastructure. How did you come to research this topic?

Hargrett: So in my case, I wouldn’t say that the focus on infrastructure was incidental. But when I was looking at convict labor on the railroads, that obviously is part of North Carolina’s transportation infrastructure. It wasn’t until I started looking at the state’s road system and how convict labor was used to build and maintain it that I realized how integral it was to that story. We’ll say starting in 1900, specifically J.S. Holmes, the state geologist who would later be the head of the state highway commission, and was pretty much the biggest proponents both of the Good Roads Movement (the modernization of the state’s roads) and the use of convict labor on public roads. He understood and argued — well first he understood that in order to massively expand and modernize this road system, you needed a large and very available labor force. And he argued for the use of convict labor very explicitly from the beginning, as did the superintendent of the state penitentiary, J.S. Mann, in the early 1900s.

So the expansion of the state road system in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s not only relied on convict labor, but it was intricately intertwined with the state prison board, the state highway commission, all of these different state departments worked together very deliberately and very closely in order to both modernize the state road system and expand the convict labor system. So it just, it just became clear that these two systems were inseparable to me.

Lenc: I don’t think that I set out to study infrastructure in prisons, but the archives definitely just kept on leading me in that direction, and sometimes in really surprising ways. In the case of the Folsom Dam, which I mentioned a moment ago, it turns out — and I didn’t know this — that this was in many ways the beginning of the modern Western electric grid. They had been experimenting with long-distance AC power at the time. And the current standard of 60 Hertz really begins actually precisely at the Folsom Dam, which ends up electrifying downtown Sacramento, which is just a dozen or so miles away. And all of the streetlights and streetcars and downtown breweries, and I believe also the Capitol itself, are electrified by the dam that is built by prisoners at that site.

And it’s part of the origin of the prison itself. The deal for the prison is that, to buy the land, they wouldn’t just pay off the claimholder at the time, who was an old miner from the Gold Rush who was still developing the area, but that they would pay in prisoner labor to help develop this dam that he’d always wanted to build. And this is at a time when, in California, legislators are really trying to figure out how they can catch up with the East Coast. They’re developing a state constitution and all these other bureaucratic forums and state buildings. There’s a desire, in order to save costs, to integrate them, to share resources between departments. And wherever there’s an opportunity for a prison, for example, to service through labor any other part of the state, then they take that very quickly whenever they can.

And I would argue that this sort of continues today. The way to understand the firefighting program in California is not just about saving the state money, necessarily. I don’t necessarily know that it does. Prisons are pretty expensive. I think that if the goal was to have prisons to fight fires, there are cheaper ways to do that. But what it does do is integrate the functions of the state to sort of appease lawmakers who are always trying to save small little pockets of money here or there. But also logistically, it’s difficult to attract laborers to a rural area to fight a fire. You have to build them a town. But if you have fire camps all over the state and people who are effectively living outside very cheaply, then you can move them at will. It’s up to you, not up to them. Then you have a lot of power to command sovereignty over a wider space and to deploy labor here and there in emergency situations. When the Oroville Dam spillway collapsed a few years ago, some of the first people on the scene were prisoners of the State of California. And it’s something that you can’t do with wage discipline. So a lot of the power of the state is not just in saving money in these circumstances, but in the power that they hold over prisoners spatially. They can move them without any real consent, under the auspices of a liberal constitution. There’s no other space like this really, outside of immigration law.

Sizek: I think the point that you’re raising, Xander, is also that these jobs that convict labor is being used for are quite dangerous. These are not jobs for ordinary people, or they’re often in forms of employment that people take that are high-risk, high-reward. So what are the conditions on the ground for these different laborers over time, and how does it change, as well?

Hargrett: So with the railroads, for example, the hazards are just evident in the work itself. You’re blasting through mountains, blasting through tunnels, etc. And the era of convict leasing on the railroads in North Carolina was absolutely the most violent. In 1881 and 1882 alone, there were 74 deaths that were deemed “natural.” On the western North Carolina railroad, 20 were killed trying to escape; there were another 90 people who died in the state penitentiary, which likely obscures a higher number of deaths that were caused by railroad work. And the warden, around this time, made a report that said that any prisoner who had spent any substantial amount of time on the railroad often came back just with their constitution shattered and their energy gone. And even with the best medical attention, they were unlikely to recover.

With road work, prisoners at least in the early years were working at every step in the process of truly constructing these roads. And they were integrated into the process a bit more thoroughly than they would be later on. And by that, I mean they were operating stone crushers, they were quarrying, they were operating heavy machinery, driving meal teams, running engines, draining the road beds, crushing the gravel, laying it down, etc. And all of that is very physical, hard labor. So those are the health hazards of the work itself.

Then you need to take into account that you’re working outside. Contrary to many penalogical arguments of the time that really touted the benefits of work in the sunshine and the fresh air, etc., the North Carolina sun can be very punishing. They were draining swamps for roadbeds. There were a lot of mosquitoes, there was a lot of malaria and instances of malarial fever that I found in different inspections and reports at the state health board, etc. Then you have the health hazards of the living conditions itself, because, as Xander noted, when you have this kind of infrastructural work, it’s easy to lose that labor in it if it’s not being geographically confined to one space. So very early on before the automobiles, the advent of the automobile, and later on, prisoners were often living in rolling cages, whether wooden cages or in steel cages that would just have a tarp thrown over them at night. There’s exposure to the elements at night, moisture, etc. So the occupational hazards of the job are one thing entirely, but then you just have the hazards of coming into direct contact with the landscape.

Lenc: That’s a great answer. And I think it raises two really important points. And one of them is the difficulty of working in the archives of identifying this violence when it happens. Sometimes, it’s actually surprisingly easy; state physician reports are often very candid about, “What happened today? Well, this man [and sometimes you’ll even get a name] fell off a large cliff in this quarry,” or “this person fell into the rock crusher,” and “this person fell into the river and drowned.” And there was, “this person went a little too close to the edge of the work yard and was shot by a guard because they thought that he maybe was trying to escape.”

Sometimes this is spelled out very clearly. But there are many other forms of violence that aren’t going to appear very transparently in the archives unless there’s an investigation. Folsom has certain wardens who became notorious for torturing, doing basically their era’s equivalent of waterboarding of prisoners. And oftentimes, this is because if you can’t just deny people wages, you have to resort to violence in order to make sure that people don’t slack off. Or sometimes, if you have a particularly sadistic guard, then they might resort to punishment for even less than that. That isn’t necessarily going to show up in the reports unless there is a big break in the press. But because these are people that the public has decided that they don’t care about very much, it’s much less likely — it’s not a priority for the average paper, which is usually very content to just condemn these men and be fine with this, although it does happen, too.

The other thing that you raise that is really important is that the prisons themselves were actually quite dangerous, work or no work. These were spaces where disease was rampant. This was an ongoing problem. Malaria in California remained a very serious concern in prison, and disease would spread very quickly. And it wasn’t necessarily a salubrious environment, even if you got to take the day off. This doesn’t necessarily excuse the labor itself, which was of course very dangerous needless to say, and these were industries, long before OSHA, where there were no safety mechanism in place to make sure that people weren’t being maimed on the job site left and right. But there were also no guarantees that you would not be similarly injured when you are just confined to yourself for 24 hours a day. That is a similarly dangerous environment, I would argue.

I think it raises the question for today of how we think about labor programs. There’s a push to, for example, eliminate prisoner labor in California — and I think there’s a great argument for this. But I think that it misses the point. If you just modify the prison labor programs, I don’t think that unto itself is the most pressing issue for prisons today. The question is, okay, are we fine if people are just kept in their cells all day, or kept on the yard all day? It seems like it’s addressing a small sidecar issue. And it has been for a long time, as people have tried to change the prison labor program without changing the question of, why there are so many people in prison in the first place?

Hargrett: To go back to Xander’s point about the recording of working and living conditions and the reporting of it, that has definitely been one of the biggest, not obstacles, but most interesting problems of my research. To your point about jails at the turn of the century — in North Carolina and elsewhere, the chain gang and labor, less so on the railroads — this argument was definitely wielded in support of convict labor on the railroads as well. But public road construction was seen as a progressive reform, a way to get the prisoner out of the dank, vermin-infested prison cell, and out into the sunshine and fresh air, etc. I mentioned that before. The problem was, as Xander mentioned, that the only looks I’ve been able to get — the only real detailed perspectives I’ve been able to get on these conditions were when there was some sort of awful tragedy that occurred and there was a thorough investigation into it.

Or interestingly, in newspapers. I’m kind of jumping around here, but in the — specifically there was this golden period in the newspapers of transparency into the work of convict laborers on North Carolina’s roads. And a lot of it, I think, was pushed by these Good Roads advocates like the state geologist, Joseph Hyde Pratt, etc. You would see very often just these little blurbs for each county, like “the convict labor gang has done this work on this road, they’re doing a great job,” or there would just be updates on where they’re moving along. Early on, they were often quite positive, commending them on their work. In 1911, there was this one blurb that I found where a street had gotten together and two women had taken the initiative to go around to their neighbors to ask if they would contribute to a Thanksgiving dinner to thank the convicts for their labor on the road. That was a very short-lived period. But there was a certain amount of transparency that I saw in newspapers that I did not see anywhere else. And it wasn’t necessarily just responding to crisis. And I’m not saying that they gave me a rosy picture at all, they were very neutral, here’s what’s going on with the roads picture. But there was a certain transparency that I did not find anywhere in state documents, for example.

There were a series of laws that were passed in North Carolina. The first one is as early as 1901 that charged each county Superintendent of Health with the responsibility of performing inspections at these camps. However, the complete lack of personnel, the inability to enforce that, just meant that reports were sporadic. There was no real template or set of guidelines for it. So the kinds of reports that were being made were all over the place. Some would be three pages long going into high detail, others would just say good condition. And also the fact that these were rolling camps. They were moving — they weren’t attached to a certain topography, they weren’t attached to a certain community, there was no way to systematically take down these conditions. And even when it became systematized later on, there would be inspection cards. The State Board of Health and the State Board of Public Welfare would do regular inspections. It just either wasn’t enforced in a lot of counties, or wasn’t archived. So it’s something that’s been really difficult to get a full picture of unless you look into other parts of the archive, like those newspapers, or, for example, the Good Roads Association circulars that are talking about the details of the work that’s being done grading roads, etc. So you can get a picture of the work that’s being done, etc. and the kind of effects that it might have on one’s health. But yeah, that’s been a constant, not erasure, but obscuring of labor conditions and working conditions in the archive.

And it was something that was also noticed at the time. I was reading a report from a prison physician, and he wrapped it up at the end by saying that this is a mess; there’s absolutely no systematic way of keeping records, so I can’t follow up on any of this. J.S. Mann, the superintendent of the prison that I mentioned before, he also recognized that the county system and the record keeping system just wasn’t organized in any sense of the word.

Sizek: So obviously, the archival traces of a lot of these programs have disappeared, aside from some newspaper reports or looking at county health reports of the jails or prisons. But the infrastructure is actually quite enduring and still exists today. What are the legacies and afterlives of prison labor that you see in your work?

Hargrett: Well, in North Carolina, the same structures are pretty much in place. I haven’t mentioned the prison farm system that was established in the late 1880s and 1890s. And it was prison farms and road labor that came to compete for convict labor once railroads ceased to be profitable for the state and private corporations. And that’s pretty much what remains now. The large majority of prisoners who are in North Carolina and working right now are maintaining public roads, building public roads, and the Caledonia State Prison Farm, which has been in operation since 1890, is still in operation. I don’t have the details in front of me right now, but I’m fairly certain that I read that the majority of the food that is circulated within the North Carolina Department of Corrections — canned food, specifically — is processed at the Caledonia State Prison Farm.

There are other ways that prisoners work. Prisoners – not prisoners, but the prison can forge contracts with the government, whether it’s beautification projects, recycling projects, etc. But one really interesting program that is in North Carolina is the Young Offenders Forest Conservation Program. Something that I get into with my dissertation is how not just public road infrastructure and the state prison system are so uniquely intertwined, but also the state’s history of forestry and conservation. There is this Young Offenders Forest Conservation Program that has young prisoners, young inmates cutting trails, doing park maintenance, etc. And just, I think it’s important to see those through-lines. You see some of the arguments for reform that I’m reading about in the late 19th century about how this helps mold character, it’s healthy for them to be in the sunshine, this kind of reformative aspect of working outside, you see them repeated with programs like this.

Lenc: In the case of the Folsom Dam, it’s sort of the exception that proves the rule. You can go to the Folsom power house, which was connected to the dam, and it’s a state park today. You can walk in, look at the old machinery, and there are some docents that’ll explain things to you. It’s well-funded, there’s plaques all over the place. And some of them will even mention, and I even have some photographs of, prisoners who actually built the facilities that made that possible. But that is, like you mentioned, rarely the case. And very frequently, the only evidence that prisoners worked on a particular site and built infrastructure, built a road, or even developed more subtle infrastructure, such as a firebreak by cutting out a number of trees, that doesn’t exist anymore, but is the reason why a town still stands (because a fire didn’t come through). That’s harder to trace. And sometimes it’s just a scrap in a newspaper from the 19th century that mentions: “Oh, they came in today, and there were a bunch of prisoners who were working on the side of the road.”

I had a real desire to try and integrate that. I’ve been talking with Elizabeth for the past year, and we were in the early stages of developing some sort of carceral labor mapping project that would integrate — because everyone in their own individual projects is finding all of these scraps in these very surprising cases. I stumbled on something that says Olvera Street in Los Angeles, which is a major tourist destination, was built by prisoners at the LA jail, and the sheriff was overseeing the construction project himself. This isn’t something that has a plaque there, commemorating that. And it would be very nice to have an integrated way to figure out where in the landscape prisoners have made their mark, necessarily not by choice.

I also think that simply commemorating is not quite enough. There’s an impulse in history to just put up more plaques. And one thing that is an irony here is, who’s going to be putting up these plaques, that’s precisely the kind of project that prisoners are often enrolled to do. Clarence Jefferson Hall has a great book about the development of Adirondack recreational facilities in upstate New York by state prisoners. And a lot of these sorts of facilities are developed by prisoners. I would say that the task of recovering this history and identifying the hidden history of the landscape is as part of a political reparations project to try and figure out how we can address what I think many of us would agree is an unjust absorption of labor, to try and develop forms of redress, and also change our current policies to create a more just attitude toward crime and punishment — one that is about racial justice, one that is about addressing class difference, and one that isn’t simply about confining things to the past and pretending that this doesn’t happen anymore.

Hargrett: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I agree with everything Xander’s just said. This project is really exciting for those reasons. And I think that combining all of these different scraps that we’ve put together, when it comes to public infrastructure, it becomes really difficult for the reasons that I said before. Just think about the state highway system of North Carolina, for example: you have the constant expansion adding onto different roads, renaming of roads, and as, you know, the National Highway System expanded, you have state highways that are absorbed into these roads. So just tracing it is so difficult.

However, to your point about public memory, I do think that that is an important component as well. When I was going through North Carolina in my research, most everyone that I shared my research with, the first response they would have was, “oh, the Civilian Conservation Corps worked on that road,” etc. That’s what’s been integrated into the public memory because that’s what’s on the plaques. I saw multiple museum exhibits on the CCC and different state parks, etc. This isn’t just for lack of desire to memorialize that. It’s, as we’re saying, the difficulty of tracking down these scraps, and also just administratively speaking, in North Carolina, the entire state prison department in 1933 was transferred to the State Highway Commission. If we’re talking about the movement of labor, the recording of labor, and how it can just kind of disappear administratively in the archive, etc. If someone is reading a book and wants to learn more about this labor that was being done on this road, they go to the index, they see “State Highway Commission,” because there was no separate prison department. It was a sub-department of the state highway commission. So memorialization is a start, because what makes it into history and geography monographs, for example, is what tends to trickle into public history textbooks, public memory, these plaques, etc. And it just perhaps makes the public interest in these kinds of projects more available.

Lenc: I agree. That’s really well said.

Sizek: Well, thank you so much for resurfacing these histories of prisoner labor for us. And thanks for coming on the podcast.

Hargrett: Thank you.

Lenc: Thank you so much for having us, Julia.

Woman’s voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Image at top (source): Chain gang of convicts engaged in road work. Pitt County, North Carolina. Autumn 1910. The inmates were quartered in the wagons shown in the picture. Wagons were equipped with bunks and move from place to place as labor is utilized. The central figure in the picture is J.Z. McLawhon, who was at that time county superintendent of chain gangs. The dogs are bloodhounds used for running down any attempted escapes.

Agricultural Modernization in China: Interview with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler

Published September 11, 2024

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow Julia Sizek interviewing Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, two scholars from different disciplines whose work focuses on the modernization of China.

Ross Doll is Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He researches agrarian change in Asia drawing on political ecology, cultural geography, and resilience ecology. Based on long-term ethnography, his current research considers the origins and influence of contemporary state-led agricultural modernization in the Yangzi Delta region of China, focusing on food security, landscape, and rural politics. Dr. Doll teaches courses on the geographies of natural resources, global and Asian development, and global poverty. He holds a PhD in Geography and a MA in China Studies from the University of Washington.

Coleman R. Mahler is a PhD Candidate in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is a history of information and truth in postwar China and Taiwan, exploring how governments across the Taiwan Strait gathered and analyzed agricultural data, and how these mass data gathering projects produced new understandings and practices of truth-making. He has published in journals including The PRC History Review and the Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming).

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. We’re recording here in the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio. We’re here with Ross Doll and Coleman Mahler, both of whom study agricultural modernization in China.

Ross is an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at UC, Berkeley. His research is in the fields of political economy of development, cultural geography, and the political ecology of agrarian change, with current work focusing on the uneven geographies of state-led agricultural modernization and rural development in China. Ross received his PhD in geography from the University of Washington, and was a visiting scholar at Clark University.

Coleman is a social and intellectual historian of Chinese elites and the state. His dissertation, “Information and the State in Rural China and Taiwan, 1937 through 1984,” is a comparative history of nation building on post-war China and Taiwan, focusing on the construction of information infrastructure in rural areas. Coleman was a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellow in Taiwan in 2021 through 2022.

So let’s get started and just get an understanding of agricultural modernization in China, which is both, you know, really important, but also maybe not that familiar to a lot of our listeners. This obviously centers the role of rural China, rather than the urban metropolises that we might think about. What’s the role of rural places and agricultural modernization in China?

Ross Doll: Sure. So to speak very broadly and generally, China’s countryside has traditionally been home to the majority of its population. Most rural people were subsistence farmers. This village subsistence system was fairly stable. It provided food for the country and for the rural people, and in fairly low-waste ways. It also provided the basis for most of what we understand to be Chinese culture.

Agricultural modernization is one of a few policies that is dramatically changing all of this within the last 30 years. Since the early 1990s, the population has changed from being over 70% rural to being around 35% rural these days. So we’ve seen major drops in the number of villages, and also increases in agricultural mechanization in recent years.

Now, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, but there’s the issue of the speed and the kind of change that we’re seeing unfolding. So this rapid move to industrialization and urbanization has implications across a broad range of factors, including the environment, food security, household economic security, as well as cultural and even psychological health.

The Chinese state has insisted all this is a natural part of development and will broadly benefit the country, but there are questions as to whether or not there are alternatives. Also, my research, as well as that of others, raises the question as just how natural all of this really is.

Coleman Mahler: Yeah, I think that’s a great answer. And I’ll talk a little bit about the 1950s, and the early Maoist period in general and the importance of rural China to the political economy of that period. So in the 1950s, rural China was incredibly important to the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, for a number of reasons. First of all, most of the economic production at that time came from rural China, and agricultural yields in the form of grain were used to pay for China’s nascent industrialization.

Grain was shipped from the countryside to cities, where it fed a burgeoning class of industrial workers, and it was also shipped overseas, sold to mostly the Soviet Union and other countries. And that was a source of industrial products that China could use in building heavy— primarily heavy industry.

So for that reason, building a really stable and productive agrarian economy was crucial to Chinese nation-building in the 1950s. And the idea of rural China was also incredibly important for CCP ideology.

So the countryside surrounding cities was a really central Mao’s way of thinking about socialism, and what became seen as his intervention in Marxism of thinking that a rural revolution was possible in the first place. So for that reason, the idea of rural China and the idea of a peasantry that was ideologically and materially tied to the CCP became kind of a touchstone of both the CCP’s ideology, as well as its political economy. And so when you go and start seeing tensions in that alliance, the kind of mythologized alliance, it produced various kinds of crises in the CCP, self-confidence, its image of itself, and in some ways, contributed to opening and reform starting in the 1980s.

Sizek: Yeah. So this is really interesting because you’re pointing out both the economic importance of agricultural production for China as it undergoes these economic transformations in the ’70s, ’80s, and beyond, as well as the importance of the idea of the peasant. So, Ross, in your work, one of the things that you found is that there are ideas about the peasantry and the role that they play in state-building, as well as just these symbols of what it is to be Chinese. Can you speak to what that looks like?

Doll: Sure. So the peasantry has had a long and complex history within the PRC, within the People’s Republic of China era. And this to my understanding, begins with its basis in Marxist-Leninism. And within this ideology, we have a sort of contradictory notion of what the peasant is. On the one hand, the peasant is a figure of class struggle, and it’s sort of a heroic figure, and something to be sort of looked up to.

On the other hand, there’s the sense that this is something that might be holding the country back. It’s not actually sort of a collective force. It doesn’t have class consciousness in a sufficient way, this kind of thing. So I think this has been a core contradiction that’s been within the Chinese state all along.

And we see this playing out in contradictory ways during the Mao era, and I think that this speaks to Coleman’s work. We see this kind of playing out within a sort of schizophrenic perspective on rural development and on rural policy and rural governance.

And then there’s a change within the post-Mao era, within the 1980s, where the state starts to take a much less contradictory sort of approach, and starts to err more on the side of a kind of rationalistic, linear, teleological notion of development, which then discards this notion of the peasant as a figure of class struggle and as part of a broader discarding of class struggle as ideology. So that’s one way, I think, of seeing how the peasant has sort of interplayed within Chinese history up until this point.

Mahler: Yeah, and I would add that one of the major watershed moments in the CCP’s ideology, as well as its understanding of the national body and the future, as Ross was just describing, comes in the late 1970s. Because before that, as Ross said, generally Marxists didn’t have a huge amount of faith in the ability of the peasantry to organize and to be a part of class struggle.

And the Chinese Communist Party always had what some historians have called a voluntaristic spirit, meaning a great faith in the ability of individuals based on their subjective will to change their material conditions. And this was incredibly important in China, because the material conditions were very poor initially.

And Mao was very focused and believed that the peasantry could become what we might now say is indoctrinated, but in his view was, believers in their own destiny, and that they could contribute their labor productively.

Sizek: So one of the points that you’re raising, Coleman, is precisely how, under the state’s ideology, there’s this belief that peasants can change their own material conditions, and at the same time, the material conditions of how they’re doing agriculture are really starting to change. So what are the programs that the state is leading to change what agriculture actually looks like on the ground? What are they doing to transform the condition of peasants?

Mahler: So there’s a few specific policies in the 1950s that the CCP implemented in the countryside. The first one is very well known and is land reform. And that was essentially a redistribution of land from landlords and what were called rich peasants, the land rich, to the land poor, which was people who had very small amounts of land, or had no land at all, and were hired labor. And so that was an incredibly important moment.

Ultimately, it didn’t necessarily change the face of agricultural production in China because the per-acre amount of land holdings per individual were still very low. But what it did do was introduce a whole amount of class labels, and a system of almost a caste system that became very important for how the state dealt with people in terms of distributing resources, and how it— dealing with its administration. So that was important for a number of reasons.

The next stage in the early 1950s, around 1953, was cooperatization. And this was meant to change the face of agricultural production in China by rationalizing the use of land, help taking the land rich and people who had a lot of labor in their households and bringing them together, sharing various kinds of farming implements. And so it was meant to transform agriculture by pooling resources, and also providing an easier means for the state to channel investment and agricultural inputs to the farmers. But this also similarly had a kind of alternative aspect to it, which is that it made it much easier for the state to extract grain from the countryside.

So all of these kinds of means of improving agricultural productivity in the Maoist era also had this aspect where it was helping the state assert more control over the countryside.

Sizek: And how do people experience this assertion of state control? Do they go along with it? What are their subjective experiences of this?

Mahler: Well, initially, farmers were fairly welcoming to receiving land and other kinds of economic benefits through land reform, because that had been a long-cherished goal of many. And the CCP played on these kind of dreams of land ownership. And there is substantial support in the literature for the CCP having a broad amount of support, at least in North China and its base areas during the wartime in the 1940s.

But what the historical record shows is that this kind of support started to wane by the time you get to the mid-1950s, and farmers realized that the distribution of land was going to be accompanied by the states taking that land back for the purpose of cooperatization, and that this was going to be part of the state requiring grain sales from the locales, and basically increasing the amount of extraction.

And so as that became clear, farmers start to become— started to become more and more wary, and this led to a variety of behaviors, what one historian has called “counteraction,” what we might think of as weapons of the weak, and included things like stealing grain from the state or the local governments, reporting falsely about how much grain was in the local communes at any one time, and other means of hoodwinking the government to prevent state extraction.

Sizek: So given there obviously was both sort of working with the state, and then also resisting the state during this time, Ross, you also find this to be the case in terms of contemporary farmers and how they are reacting to state-led policies. Can you tell us a little bit about how there might be some historical echoes with the past with what you’re seeing today?

Doll: So in my field site, which is notable for being one of the first places in China to receive funding from the state for agricultural modernization, the state’s plan, which begins around middle of the 2000s, is to try to encourage large-scale and mechanized farming while still maintaining the basic structure of the Chinese agricultural land system, which is collective.

So in this scheme, the idea is to try to encourage farmers to lease their land to large-scale farmers on typically five-year contracts in exchange for rent. And so the state introduces this policy in the context of also reducing funding for rural government — so creating a kind of vacuum in their funding, and thus a great incentive, in some respect, for rural governments to try to expand this policy as much as possible.

And so what happens is the rural governments find these new large-scale farmers, but then the process is trying to create— to find a sort of balance point between the rent that they’re going to offer these large-scale farmers and what they can afford to give to the villagers. And so inevitably, there are a lot of people who are not really on board with this, a lot of villagers are not on board with this new system, and they resist.

And so the rural government turns to a number of different kinds of strategies to try to persuade or coerce villagers into giving up their land. So these strategies include — they sort of begin with ideological reeducation, which is often getting people together in a group, or visiting their homes, and trying to talk sense into them to try to persuade them that this is really the best possible route for them to take for their households, which is to give up farming and exchange it for rent of some kind.

And when a lot of people still resisted this idea, then the rural government turned to more heavy-handed tactics — so things like threats, the threat of taking away social security benefits for villagers, and then even more heavy-handed tactics, things like demolishing whole villages or eliminating irrigation ponds, or leaving land in a state of— under the auspices of mechanized — or industrializing it, but leaving land in a sort of unfarmable state such that farmers have no choice but to give their land over to the village.

One of the interesting things about this, though, is that I find that a lot of farmers in my field site, they gave over their land on these five-year contracts, but still had a desire to resume farming at the end of that five-year term. But then at the end of that five-year term, many decided to give up on the idea of farming, even though they could have retaken their land.

And so this— what I argue in some of my work is that one of the reasons why this happens is that the landscape itself, by being industrialized and modernized, and through this process — keeping farmers away from it through the process of formalizing it legally, as well as demolishing it and setting up barriers in various forms — that farmers became, in some respect, sort of naturalized to what the landscape represented.

And the landscape started to reinforce the ideology that the state was — upon which the state had proposed agricultural modernization to begin with. So the landscape had a kind of symbolic power, and this was a reason why it is that this was a more permanent kind of shift rather than, say, a five-year temporary shift in land leasing and in land use.

Sizek: So in many ways, what seemed like a temporary leasing structure, a five-year leasing structure, becomes a permanent leasing structure for these people, because the landscape seems to have changed very dramatically while they were there. What were some of the reactions of the people who you talked to about this? How did they frame their relationship to the land, and how it maybe had changed over the period of time that you interviewed them?

Doll: Sure. So at the beginning of the fieldwork cycle, which started in 2014 for me, this was at the point when a lot of people had just signed over their land on these five-year contracts. And I need to be clear that many people embraced this opportunity. They didn’t want a farm, and they were excited for the chance to turn their land over to a large-scale farmer in exchange for rent.

But I still found that the majority of farmers that I spoke to, and also the informal leaders of the villages, what they reflected to me was that the majority of villagers were hesitant to do this. But through the processes I was just describing — of ideological reeducation, coercion, pressure, this kind of thing — people did sign over their land. So they were resistant to it.

And there are various reasons, I think, why this was. But through the course of– and I think that there are a variety of reasons why this did happen. For example, over the five-years process of, you lease your land, you turn it over, and you become acclimated to a different way of life, you start doing different things. You take different jobs. Maybe you move away from the land.

Also, the idea of retaking the land, it might not seem as convenient. You might be able to have your land given back to you on a — to retake your land after that five-year lease. But maybe to farm again would be inconvenient. Or maybe by that point, a lot of these farmers are older. They’re feeling that maybe they’re starting to age out of that work.

But I also feel as though, and my fieldwork backs this up, that what I was seeing is that the villagers were using the land as a sort of reference point to speak to their relationship to it. And so while at the beginning of this process, villagers were referring to the land to say, look at the land, we know it, we can farm just as well as these large-scale farmers, based on our experience farming the land, what all of it has taught us, our knowledge of it.

And then coming back, when I returned to the land in 2017 and 2018, people then — the same people were referring to the land, but to speak to the ways that it was signifying the inevitability or the naturalness of a different kind of ideology, this sort of modernist ideology and rationalism, and sort of a linear way of development. And so the land had taken on a different kind of symbolic fixture and meaning for people over the course of that time.

So I think it speaks to the ways that our built environments, or the environments around us, have this kind of symbolic power and can reinforce these kinds of power dynamics, and can speak to different kinds of notions of value and identity and belonging, based on the way that it’s constructed.

Sizek: And this sort of symbolic power of the land also gets us back to this question that we started with a little bit, this question of the role of the CCP ideology in shaping how people think about agricultural modernization. So one of the interesting things, I think, Coleman, about your work is that you’re not only looking at the CCP, but you’re also looking at the Chinese Nationalist Party, known as the KMT. How are their approaches different to agricultural modernization, and what does it have to do with their ideology?

Mahler: Yeah. So the CCP generally imported the Soviet model to a large extent, at least early on, meaning the Soviets had a model in which they pushed collectivization of agriculture in order to both increase productivity, and also to take grain from the agricultural sector and bring it into industry. And the CCP generally relied on this, and that was a central part of Marxist-Leninist thinking in that period, though it did change later on in the late 1970s, which is something I can come back to.

On Taiwan, the Nationalist Party was in some ways very content to leave Taiwan as what we might call a “small peasant” economy, meaning they had no real forceful effort at collectivization, and they relied on an American model that focused on introducing agricultural inputs through what’s called “agricultural extension,” meaning things like fertilizer, mechanical plows, and things like this, or tractors. And to give these— to sell these directly to farmers, and to not really focus on increasing the scale of the plots, and so not to reap economies of scale.

And they did have some similar aspects. They had farmers’ associations, which were technically voluntary to join, but were supervised by the state. But it was much more of an American model based on American agricultural extension practices going back to the early 20th century. And this made sense in a lot of ways because the primary agricultural policymakers, or at least many of them, had been trained in America. And there was a substantial presence of American aid on Taiwan in the 1950s and ’60s as a part of the Cold War environment.

Sizek: So to track back to how these are different, obviously, in the CCP case, you have people who are being influenced to give up their land. It seems like in Taiwan this isn’t the case. How have historians sort of dealt with these differences and why they think these differences exist between the KMT and the CCP, and maybe beyond? I mean, obviously it seems like Americans are in Taiwan. What are some other reasons why there are these big differences in their agricultural policies?

Mahler: Yeah, it’s interesting. In both cases, agriculture was in many ways a handmaiden to industry, and that was also the case in Taiwan, which in some ways mimicked Japan, although in a lesser way of starting to become a very prominent exporter of light industrial products in the 1960s, sending various kinds of textiles and other kinds of things to America, as well as agricultural products.

And so that was, in some ways, a similar case to the CCP, which also used agricultural to fund industry, although they focused on heavy industry and defense to a much larger extent. And in general, there’s been a much more positive reaction in academic history to the Taiwan experience. So there’s a book that is entitled, I believe, The Taiwan Miracle [State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle]. And so this was seen as this product of entrepreneurship and what’s called— what was called “Free China” at that time.

And so Taiwan was held up as a model of a state that didn’t try to dominate in the same way as the CCP did, and in that way, succeeded. And that has been placed under significant revisionist scholarship since. People have started to think about Taiwan as a developmental state, meaning a kind of post-war phenomenon, including Japan to some extent, where the state plays a very dominant role in directing economic investment.

And so people are starting to think about Taiwan as, in some ways, being more similar to the Mainland China than we had previously thought. And in some ways, that’s also where I pick up with my research. But we’re still trying to figure out exactly in what ways are they similar and what ways were they different. And there’s a whole host of potential reasons why that was the case.

So of course, there’s ideology. The KMT, the Nationalist Party, was in many ways less concerned with managing the economy than the CCP was, and they had a whole range of technocrats that they assigned responsibilities to. Whereas the CCP was, in some ways, much jealous— much more jealous of its authority and less willing to delegate authority to experts, and had a much more complicated relationship with them.

There’s also the resources that Taiwan inherited from the Japanese who had colonized Taiwan in 1895 and ruled it until 1945, and had done a huge amount of work in improving Taiwanese agriculture and introducing things like irrigation and creating various kinds of infrastructure, such as land records. So the historical and inheritances were also very different between the two countries. And in some ways, the CCP started off much farther behind Taiwan. And so that’s definitely something that should be taken into account.

Sizek: And in that, you raise this really interesting question about the relationship between of individual farmers and the state, and the role of these experts who are either advising the state or who are advising individual farmers. So what is the structure of the communication between the state and the individual farmer in both of these cases, and what does that look like for sort of individual Chinese farmers?

Mahler: So on Mainland China, it changes a lot in the 1950s because you have the process of collectivization. By the end of collectivization, when you get commune starting in 1958, which is these large administrative units that also manage agriculture, basically all the farmers interactions are structured by the administration of the commune, which had a few different levels. So farmers would be part of local teams, what were called teams.

And then there was would go up to the next level, which was called brigades, and then you would finally keep going up to the commune management. And so at each level, there were various kinds of cadres, which is a general term, meaning someone in an administrative position that may or may not have had an affiliation to the party, but very often did.

And the farmer’s relationship with the land would be mediated through this administrative structure because they would not have owned their own property. Rather, they would have been assigned various kinds of tasks by the commune, and then received a share of the proceeds. So their entire relationship with the land, kind of going back to what Ross was talking about, was mediated through the state or these local aspects of it.

And that had a number of effects in terms of if the communes didn’t have good management for whatever reason, if the policies that weren’t really suitable for local conditions were put in place, they didn’t have necessarily a huge amount of ability to resist these, except on a micro level. And so you get all kinds of collusion between farmers who are trying to make sure that they don’t suffer too much under what they would consider to be an irrational or incorrect policies.

And so there’s a huge lag in terms of the local knowledge at the team level versus when you keep going higher into the commune and for commune administrative hierarchy, and then once you go beyond communes to get to the provincial level. So at each one of those levels, there’s a very different understanding of what’s happening. And it’s often incredibly opaque.

And this becomes a huge problem for the Communist state as it’s seeking to gather things like agricultural statistics. And on Taiwan, it’s a very different situation. To a large extent, the farmers associations mediate the relationship between the state and farmers, but these are much less invasive organizations, and they are more places that farmers go to purchase various kinds of agricultural inputs and they don’t have to do any of these things.

They might not be able to get the kinds of inputs they want without having to go through a state intermediary, which will only sell them certain kinds of things. So, for instance, the American advisors on Taiwan attempted to only sell fertilizer in certain ratios that they thought were scientifically proven to increase yields, and they tried to discourage farmers from using other kinds of fertilizer that they might have preferred.

But they didn’t use administrative coercion to enforce that. Rather, they used the mechanism of controlling the sale of these kinds of products. And this was not easy, but the way that the Taiwanese government could do this was because there was a monopoly on the sale of fertilizer in this period. So they also had a very invasive state presence compared to what we think of in the United States and some other countries. But it wasn’t as administratively kind of centralized as CCP agriculture was.

Sizek: Yeah. So I think this race is sort of an interesting methodological question too, because you’re really trying to go between these very different scales, the local level of the people who are just trying to farm some stuff so that they can eat, all the way up to the elite level. So how do both of you sort of approach this scalar problem in your research, and understanding these local experiences and also trying to locate them in these administrative records that you might be examining?

Doll: Well, I guess I see that– I see all these forces sort of coming to ground in every particular place. So I think that understanding the ways that policy and administration work together with historical ideology. You can see these things sort of translated within the ways that local governments, rural governments respond to different kinds of pressures, and also to different kinds of opportunities.

But then you can also see all of those things within the ways that villagers respond to and their own attitudes. So I think that for me, I can– I think it’s interesting to see how all of these are sort of conjunctural in some respect. You can see them manifested in responses and in behaviors.

But I think that it’s important to remember that this is a sort of dialogue between– this isn’t simply a matter of– and it’s a common kind of thought to have that within, especially Mainland China, that the state is all powerful and different sorts of proclamations are made and people just sort of kind of move in line to them.

But there is absolutely a kind of dialogue, not only between the local government and the rural government– or the national government, but also between the people and the various levels of government. There’s different kinds of push and pull and that kind of thing. And so to see these within, again, these kinds of longer, broader historical processes and dialogues across space and time, I think is a really important way of understanding Chinese history and contemporary situations.

Mahler: Yeah. And I mean, what you just raised is one of the central issues that I’m dealing with in my research. The way that I deal with it currently is by focusing primarily on the state’s perspective, and then trying to understand how it pursues knowledge production and information gathering. And to a large extent, these governments, if you read their various kinds of internal or external records, actually have a healthy discussion of these problems facing them.

And as a historian, it becomes possible to take a look at what they see as their problems, and then to provide a larger historical context into why that was happening with what we know now. And then also to really go and look at how the state required local actors in order to carry out these various projects that they wanted to implement.

And so it really becomes a very kind of following the leads type process in which you see, OK, what is the government complaining about in this instance? What are they what are they saying is their problem? And then looking at the chain of actions going down to the local level and the very specific politics in the different administrative levels. And trying to figure out how is what’s happening outside of the central government influencing how the central government perceives itself, what it’s doing in the various problems that it confronts.

And you see at some point that sometimes these governments do have a decent grasp of that something is happening that’s not good, but they’re having difficulty perceiving exactly why it’s happening. And so what I try to do is provide a larger context for that kind of discussion of the state with itself and with its very constituent parts.

Sizek: So what are some of the common challenges that they faced or they thought that they had, and what does that do to change how we think about the Chinese state?

Mahler: Yeah. So a really crucial problem that both governments faced is something that the historian Philip Kuhn talks about, which is called middlemen. And it’s kind of a general term, but what he’s talking about is how during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from around 1644 to 1911, and was the final Chinese imperial dynasty.

The state had a large amount of difficulty in understanding what was happening at the local level because it had a very minimal governance and was forced to rely on local power brokers who, for various reasons, obfuscated what was happening at the local level and to a large extent created various kinds of rackets to extract tax surcharges from the locals.

And so this became a real issue for all the Chinese states that existed after this, figuring out how to break through the local level and the local power brokers. And Phillip Kuhn argues that Land Reform for the CCP was a way of getting rid of these local elites who might have resisted its rule. And by having these hard-nosed class-based campaigns against rich peasants, landlords, they got rid of that group.

The problem was that a new group of middle men emerged for various reasons, from the lower peasant classes, the new kinds of leaders that emerged were not necessarily receptive to the CCP policies. And the issue is that the CCP was ultimately forced to rely on these groups for collecting taxes, collecting agricultural statistics because they were the ones that were closest to the ground and had knowledge of local society.

And so a big question in my dissertation is about how did Taiwan somewhat more successfully break the power of middle men at the local level. And currently, my thinking is that Taiwan had these historical inheritance from the Japanese, including land maps, much more precise land maps that had acreage of the land, had the exact physical location, and serial numbers that linked the owners to the specific plots. And was able to do more things like intensive sampling to gain a better understanding of crop yields.

And also through these fertilizer programs, the fertilizer monopoly, it had these means of forcing farmers to go along without creating the kinds of bizarre administrative incentives that sometimes plagued Mainland China. So the ways in which they dealt with– these two states dealt with local elites and whether or not they were able to successfully either co-opt or bypass them became a really important aspect of whether or not these nation-building projects were successful.

Doll: Well, it reminds me of my master’s thesis, which I wrote about. It was a comparison between mainland China and Taiwan and Land Reform approaches to formalization and rural development in general. And it reminds me of the ways that the KMT government in Taiwan made specific efforts to try to almost break the will of the former landlords and make sure that they sort of stayed down.

And one of the things that came up in my work that I thought was interesting is that there were these– I can’t remember what they were called, there were of informal courts and their intention was to help resolve specifically issues around land, but that the judges on these courts almost every time ruled in favor of the villagers and they never ruled in favor of the landlords. So this, I think, reminds me of– what you said just reminds me that there was a concerted effort to try to make sure those elites were– and especially the former elites stayed at a weakened position.

Mahler: Yeah. So in Taiwan, I think another important aspect was the presence of the American foreign aid bodies that controlled a lot of the investment in agriculture. And because they controlled all that investment, and were able to fiscally monitor what was going on at the local level, they were able to use the monitoring of this investment as a way of enforcing their will onto the farmers. So that was also an important aspect of it.

Whereas in China, because the investment was done through a complex patronage politics, it was much harder to track and to use fiscal leverage as a means of getting certain kinds of desired outcomes at the local level. Yeah, I don’t a huge amount about the relationship with landlords.

I mean, I in terms of Land Reform that, yes, they were extremely prejudiced against them, and kind of viewed them as a group that was going to use all kinds of tactics to hoodwink the state. But I’m not sure– I don’t personally know how that impacted the long-term agricultural modernization program on Taiwan.

Sizek: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting because one of these– it raises this question where it seems like in Taiwan because they have the American presence that’s really influencing the way that aid is being governed, fertilizer is being governed, all of these sorts of agricultural inputs. And then rather than have this middleman problem, they solve it through an economic solution.

But instead, in China, the problem seems to be that the middlemen are still trying to obfuscate everything. They’re trying to hold on to their local elite status. And this for me, it makes me wonder about the way that these middlemen have changed over time, and particularly what they look like now when agricultural modernization is so different in China. What have you seen sort of middlemen today, and what do they try to do or are they completely subsumed by the state ideology now?

Doll: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. It’s interesting to think about who are the current elites right now in China, in the Mainland because those elites that we were referring to historically, they more or less they were removed in various ways or ceased to have power once Mao came into power once the CCP took over.

But these days, with agricultural modernization, what we see, at least in my field site, and I think in many field sites, is an effort on the part of the rural governments to try to coalesce their power by cooperating with especially sort of elites from the urban areas around them, the county seat, this kind of thing, to take over those positions. And so they’re working with them to try to make sure that they become the new large-scale farmers.

And in my field site, this was, for the most part, kind of a disaster. It worked for a few years. But in the end, these the scales of farms that drew the elites to large-scale farming were simply too big. They couldn’t profit off of– or they couldn’t manage farms of this scale, especially given a lack of experience, but a variety of other factors.

And this was also in the context of a sort of post-2007, 2008 time when there everywhere around the world people were looking to invest in commodities. And this was not lost on, again, these even sort of smaller scale kinds of elites. So what we have now, from my perspective, is we have a real sort of bifurcation.

We have this sort of elite of the elite that still hold on to some parts of land, like in my field site, and I in many others. And these folks are more or less propped up by the rural government. They’re given kickbacks. They’re allowed to prosper and encouraged to prosper because their farms can act as sort of representations symbols of rural government power. They’re demonstration sites in some sense.

So when these folks are– when they’re evaluated, when higher ups come to see what they’ve done, they can show them these and say, hey, look how great– what a great job I’ve done and how good I am at my job. But really, these farms, these large-scale farms by the elite of the elites are mostly sort of– they’re fake to some extent. They don’t really produce very much. They waste a ton of land.

And then what we’ve seen in the shift is that a lot of the farm, the land that used to be farmed by the large-scale farmers, the former elites, has since been those folks have abandoned those processes and the land has been taken over by the sort of children of the people who were, I would say, dispossessed in some sense in those sort of first stages that I was describing.

So these are folks who’ve come back that have hit 50. They’ve sort of aged out of the– informally aged out of work and labor in urban areas and the low-wage work. So they’ve come back to their homes in an effort to raise their families and have a quieter life because they don’t have many other options. And they’ve taken over smaller scales of large-scale farming.

But now we get into the problem of they too are struggling because their scales are so small that they don’t really get the attention of the local government. They’re too small, there are too many of them, they don’t really matter very much. And so they struggle to solve even basic problems that they need the government, the local government to help them solve, like putting a new roads, basic extension services, this kind of thing.

So we’re sort of stuck in this middle ground. We have, on the one hand, fake large-scale farmers, and on the other hand, really struggling smaller scale/large scale farmers. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I think it does expose some really interesting problems within the basis of Chinese governance and ideology.

Mahler: Yeah. I just want to clarify one thing about what I said earlier about the role of local elites, which is that they kind of had a dual nature in which they both– sometimes they would act on their own self-interest. For instance, if they were a local leader, they might inflate statistics to try to look good to the state, and maybe get promotion or get more resources sent down their way. So they had that state-facing aspect.

But sometimes they also– if they felt aggrieved by the state or felt to be more part of local society, they would try to protect the other farmers in their area and under report to the state. So they did have this dual aspect. And it changed over time based on what the incentives of the political economy were. And that changed over the 1950s and ’60s.

Sizek: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast to talk about agricultural modernization and China.

Doll: Thank you very much for having us.

Mahler: Thank you very much.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

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Article

K-Beauty in War: A Visual Interview with Claire Chun

Published July 22, 2024

Korean beauty products, or “K-Beauty,” are not only a part of the beauty industry, but part of a long legacy of the Korean War. For this visual interview, Matrix Postdoc Julia Sizek interviews Claire Chun, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, about her work on the industry and its history. Chun’s research explores how modern conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping forces of U.S. militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism.

Korean beauty products, known popularly as K-Beauty, has not only become a multi-billion dollar industry, but has become one of the cornerstones of international beauty products. Your work situates K-Beauty in a particular context: the legacies of the Korean War. What can we learn from looking at the rise of K-Beauty alongside that of a war that was never formally ended?

A magazine headline and a photo of a Korean woman. — Screenshot from Elle UK article, “What is K-Beauty? Here’s Everything You Need to Know,” by Elle Beauty Team, June 29, 2021.

For many of us, the word “K-Beauty” immediately surfaces images, ideas, feelings, and maybe even fantasies. These images might range from cosmetic and skincare products to the poreless faces of Korean celebrities to familiar phrases like “10 step skincare routine” or “glass skin.” We might feel good, secure, and assured when thinking about K-Beauty.

In fact, in a 2021 article, “What is K-Beauty? Here’s Everything You Need to Know,” women’s lifestyle magazine ELLE confidently asserted that K-Beauty is “the secret to looking as luminous as is humanly possible.” Now a permanent mainstay in our “global beauty lexicon,” K-Beauty is no longer simply defined by skincare and beauty products, but has come to signify a larger ecology of embodied and mediated desires, practices, actors, and aesthetics. My research argues that the otherworldly luminosity promised by K-Beauty is much more than a qualitative description of the skin. But what kinds of promises does Korean luminosity extend?

In my research, I am really interested in thinking about what such promises and their failures might reveal about the fantasies and anxieties that shape not only global beauty markets, but also Korean modernity, the social life of war, and everyday practices of bodily rehabilitation. In other words, my project moves away from the question of “what does beauty look like?” to “what is beauty doing?” and “what does beauty require?”

Although cosmetic industries have been pivotal in the meteoric rise of global Korean visibility since the turn of the 21st century and throughout the ongoing accelerating militarization of the Korean peninsula and the Pacific, the bulk of critical scholarship on U.S. empire and militarism has not considered beauty practices and body politics very expansively. I think in many ways it is Korean beauty’s oversaturation in global media discourses that has occluded a more rigorous examination of its stakes. My dissertation, “Beauty Ecologies: War, Wellness, and the Aesthetics of Repair,” wrestles with this scholarly gap and explores how beauty and wellness are vital sites of racialized war-making and alternative sense-making.

Here, I’m really interested in expanding our commonsense understanding of beauty as simply a set of aesthetic standards or consumer products or industry trends. Instead, my thinking is aligned with that of other critical beauty studies scholars such as Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Mimi Nguyen, S. Heijin Lee, Vanita Reddy, and Genevieve Clutario, who really push us to take beauty seriously as an animating force, an “imperative discourse” (Nguyen); as that which “[holds] out hopes for vitality, for life itself” (Tu); and as a “set of narratives and practices that map forms of Asian modernity” (Lee, Moon, Tu).

Against the backdrop of the unended Korean War (a peace treaty was never signed, leaving the two Koreas in a suspended stalemate to this day), my own thinking and theorizing builds on these formulations to offer a reading of beauty as fundamentally a question about managing life in war. From South Korean plastic surgery’s wartime origin in U.S. medical humanitarian aid, to the rapidly expanding state-sponsored wellness tourism industry and intensifying militarization of Jeju Island, to discourses of transgenerational trauma and healing in Korean diasporic expressive culture, my research explores how beauty gets recruited, consolidated, and distributed in terms of repair.

In some ways, plastic surgery began literally as repair, in the context of the Korean War. How did plastic surgery rise in Korea?

The history of plastic surgery in Korea is a history of war. As scholars such as S. Heijin Lee, So Yeon Leem, John DiMoia, and Alka Menon have traced, the practice and consumption of plastic surgery in Korea emerged during and in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War. Indeed, plastic surgery as a field of surgical science developed to meet the needs of repair in the wake of two World Wars that left soldiers and civilians disabled and disfigured. Plastic surgery techniques thus had to innovate to treat unprecedented scales of debilitation wrought by new weapons of war, including severe burns and facial disfigurement caused by chemical warfare and artillery fire.

What interests me about the history of plastic surgery in Korea, however, is the ways in which reconstructive and aesthetic surgery were explicitly doled out as global humanitarian aid efforts by the U.S. military during the Korean War, whereby military surgeons performed cosmetic procedures alongside reconstructive surgeries for combat victims and civilians alike. It’s the very slippage between the reconstructive and aesthetic that I’m especially concerned with, specifically within the contexts of the unended Korean War and ongoing U.S. military occupation of Korea. When we reframe beauty within the terms of debility and repair, how does that change its stakes?

Many English language accounts credit the modern practice of cosmetic surgery in Korea to Dr. D. Ralph Millard, who served as Chief Plastic Surgeon to the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War. Having written on his experience in Korea, Millard reveals in his published medical literature the humanitarian impulse behind distributing plastic surgery as a form of American benevolence: “One of the purposes of the U.S. Marines remaining in Korea after the ceasefire was to assist the war-ravaged people in their rehabilitation. It seemed that plastic surgery should be a part of this project and through it would be constructed visible evidence of American goodwill in Asia.” There’s something really significant here about the ways that Millard formulates rehabilitated Korean bodies as “visible evidence” of America’s so-called “goodwill.” This formulation reveals how vital the visuality of repair, which I argue is also to say beauty, is to legitimizing the project of American military occupation and empire-building.

A picture of the same man shown before and after plastic surgery. — Popularly circulated image of a Korean patient from Dr. D. Ralph Millard’s published journal article “Oriental Peregrinations” in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 16(5):p 319-336, November 1955.

Indeed, much of Millard’s published literature about his work in Korea hinges on “before” and “after” portraits that reveal a remarkable transformation. One such makeover that widely circulates in relation to Millard’s legacy is that of a Korean interpreter (pictured above) who in Millard’s words, “came in requesting to be made into a ‘round-eye.’” According to Millard’s account, this Korean man hoped to migrate to the United States but was concerned that the “squint in his slant eyes” made him appear inscrutable and thus distrustful to white Americans.

The explicitly racialized motivations informing Millard’s surgical practice during the immediate post-war period are important to understanding how racial ideologies scaffolded ideas of aesthetic repair. Indeed, Millard referred to his cosmetic surgical work in Korea, the bulk of which was most concerned with widening the eyes through surgical incisions and sutures on the eyelid, as “deorientalizing.” As such, the blepharoplasty procedure (colloquially known as double eyelid surgery) has become almost synonymous with Korean plastic surgery, despite its 19th-century origins as a reparative procedure.

However, while Millard is often credited with introducing and popularizing the blepharoplasty procedure in Korea, John DiMoia and Alka Menon further contextualize the development of Korea’s plastic surgery industry by pointing to the regional forces that also shaped cosmetic surgical procedures before the Korean War. In particular, they underscore the development of surgical techniques in Singapore and Japan prior to Millard’s arrival in Korea which, as they argue, informed his own practice as well as the development of a regional Asian aesthetic. And so, I’m really interested in paying attention to these overlapping forces, as plastic surgery in Korea is fundamentally entangled in transnational and regional circuits of aesthetics, medicine, war, and empire.

Today, the figure of plastic surgery in Korea seems very different from its origins. The popularity of plastic surgery in Korea has led to the coining of a phrase translated to “plastic surgery monster,” which describes someone whose plastic surgeries have rendered them into a grotesque figure. What is a “plastic surgery monster”?

As I mentioned earlier, K-Beauty likely produces positive feelings for the average consumer. We feel reassured, maybe even hopeful. But just as quickly as we are able to imagine the aspirational fantasies of clear skin, we might also be reminded of the seemingly terrifying excesses of such desires for beauty, most notably in the form of plastic surgery. Since the turn of the 21st century, South Korean plastic surgery consumption has saturated global media discourses, inciting fascination and horror among Western and Asian audiences alike. We’ve likely encountered Western news media articles with spectacular titles like, “Victims of Craze for Cosmetic Surgery” or “South Korea’s Growing Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery” that stoke the flames of hysteria. And even in Korea, online users have coined a term, sung-gui, which directly translates to “plastic surgery monster.”

picture showing korean women with westernized features — Illustration by Korean webtoon artist, Mind C. Image retrieved from https://namu.wiki/w/성형 괴물

Explicit in its naming, the term, which first began circulating in the early 2010s, describes a person who has undergone excessive cosmetic alteration to the extent that their postoperative body looks highly artificial and indeed, grotesque. In Korea, there are recognizable features of a plastic surgery monster which, as So Yeon Leem details, includes a “convex forehead, overly wide eyes and thick eyelids, a long and protruding nose, an awkwardly shaped mouth, and an excessively small jaw.” We can see in the illustration above a caricaturized representation of these very features. As both Leem and this illustration demonstrate, the plastic surgery monster is marked by a mimetically formulaic appearance that has been criticized as “cheap-looking,” “unpleasant,” and “unnatural.”

Body modification by way of plastic surgery has long been a source of visual disorientation, repulsion, disgust, and even terror. As the global media response indicates, the seemingly otherworldly contortions of skin, flesh, cartilage, and bone continue to provoke acute anxieties about race, gender, and the body. Against this backdrop, what really interests me about the label “plastic surgery monster” is the implied accusation that body modification deemed excessive is explicitly monstrous. How do we measure excess in this context? What are the metrics of monstrosity?

The very category of “monster” warrants a thorough analysis — which I can’t provide here in this interview, but have written about in my published work — as the history of racialized bodies organizes the discourse of monstrosity. Scholars like Jack Halberstam and Fatimah Tobing Rony track the ways in which the “monster” is racialized as a “foreign alien” and “taxidermic specimen.” Thinking with Halberstam and Rony, I want to know more about what exactly is monstrous about the surgically modified Korean woman. How does her monstrosity shift and signify differently in different places and historical moments? And thus, what kind of warning is the condemnation of her aesthetic pursuits meant to provide? In other words, what should we be afraid of?

To understand this phenomenon, you look at the work of Mirae kh RHEE, whose The Multiverse Portraits imagines herself in parallel universes. The images are evocative as both self-portraits and imagined self-portraits of what one could look like. Can you describe the portraits?

an image of a gallery in a museum — The Multiverse Portraits, 2015-16, photography, drawings, various dimensions, installation view: Where Are We Now., Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2016, curated by Frank Wagner and Silke Wittig. Photo credit: Jens Ziehe, used with permission.

Mirae kh RHEE is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin whose self-portrait series The Multiverse Portraits (2015-2016) was at the center of my recently published essay, “Monstrous Beauty: Unruly Bodies and Diasporic Plasticity in kate-hers RHEE’s ‘The Multiverse Portraits.’” (The artist was formerly known as kate-hers RHEE but now professionally uses the name Mirae kh RHEE.) The work is a multimedia installation that incorporates photography and drawing in its speculative representation of RHEE’s body across three imagined parallel universes: The Reality Universe, The Gangnam Universe, and The Ethnic Hardening Universe (Self-Portrait Exaggerating my Mongoloid Features). These imagined “co-existing self-contained realities” are intended to evoke before and after images of pre- and post-surgery makeovers as frequently utilized in plastic surgery advertising in Korea.

the artist shown without makeup, looking into the camera and off to the side. — The Multiverse Portraits: The Reality Universe, 2015, photography, each 42 x 59.4 cm, used with permission.

The Reality Universe is a photographic portrait of RHEE in what she describes as “unflattering lighting” and “unflattering clothing,” meant to reference the “before” images of plastic surgery transformations.

the artist wearing make up looking forward and off to the side. — The Multiverse Portraits: The Gangnam Universe, 2016, photography, each 42 x 59.4 cm, used with permission.

In contrast, her post-makeover portrait, The Gangnam Universe, is a heavily photoshopped rendering in which her face and body have been altered in accordance with Korean beauty standards.

sketched portrait showing a woman looking into the camera and off to the side — The Multiverse Portraits: The Ethnic Hardening Universe, 2015, graphite on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm, photo credit: Aleks Slota, used with permission.

Lastly, The Ethnic Hardening Universe (Self-Portrait Exaggerating my Mongoloid Features) is a direct response to what American plastic surgeons refer to as “ethnic softening,” a term used to describe cosmetic procedures performed on non-white patients. As the term implies, such procedures are intended to soften the “hardness,” which is to say the seeming immutability, of racialized facial features.

I was really captivated by how RHEE leans into and plays with the body horror of the plastic surgery monster by literally metamorphosizing her body through Photoshop and drawing. She gets us to critically reflect on how biological determinations of race continue to persist in the ways we make meaning out of the face and body (i.e. “African American nose,” “Asian eyes,” “Caucasian nose”). By surfacing these taken-for-granted racial signifiers and then also contorting them, RHEE pushes us to lean into our voyeuristic viewing practices, inviting viewers to look, stare, and feel by recruiting ethnographic techniques of photographic documentation.

As a self-described “visual anthropological presentation,” the taxonomical and taxidermic display of RHEE’s face and body across all three portraits borrows criminal portraiture conventions, showcasing RHEE in both full-body shots and headshots. Here, RHEE complicates pre- and post-surgery photography to draw out its shared aesthetic form with photographic conventions that have historically rendered racialized subjects into objects of surveillance. And so, as participatory spectators, we become enmeshed in this visual history. The Multiverse Portraits captures our attention and holds our gaze in ways that might feel unsettling. You want to look away, but you can’t. What happens in these moments of repulsion and discomfort?

These images are both realistic and manufactured, as if they are both anthropological taxonomies and imagined selves. How does the simultaneous realism and lack of realism in these images shape your reading of the artworks?

The trouble with realism is at the heart of RHEE’s work. It’s the very slipperiness of “realness” that RHEE draws out and experiments with across her self-portraits. Plastic surgery procedures and their consumers are often indicted as “fake,” “artificial,” and “excessive.” However, such critiques implicitly depend on the legitimacy and coherence of a “natural” and “real” body, which, as scholars across ethnic studies, Black studies, Native studies, disability studies, and feminist queer theory have made clear, reifies the human body as a stable, discrete entity. And so, I’m really captivated by how RHEE takes up plastic surgery as a direct mode of address whereby we are tasked with confronting our presumptions of authenticity. By getting us to think hard about what kinds of beauty we celebrate as “truthful” and condemn as “deceptive,” RHEE extends a larger critique about how transpacific projects of war racialize non-normative bodies and subjectivities as deficient and unruly, and thus in need of repair.

By appropriating ethnographic tropes and methods, RHEE is able to morph and contort her body in ways that render her self-representation unreliable. For instance, in The Ethnic Hardening Universe, we can see that she has hyberbolized certain phenotypic features such as her nose, cheekbones, and jaw, while minimizing others, most notably her eyes. In so doing, RHEE leans into the ugly artifice of not only her plasticized body, but also the dysphoria of her ethnoracial “inauthenticity” as an adopted Korean person.

As Korean adoption studies scholars like Eleana Kim, Kim Park Nelson, Tobias Hübinette, and Arissa Oh demonstrate, Korean transnational adoption began as a post-war response to not only the surplus of orphaned children, but also more specifically, mixed-race children born to American GI and UN officer fathers and unwed Korean mothers. These adoptions exploded in the mid-1980s, with an average of 8,000 children leaving Korea every year. Korean babies would prove to be a powerful transnational currency that would inaugurate not only Korean modernization by way of millions of crucial dollars in national revenue, but also secure diplomatic relations with the Western nations receiving Korea’s expendable children. Against this historical context, RHEE thus undermines the assumed veracity of her own self- representation as an adopted Korean person, unsettling any viewing desire for her full interiority. And so, while her portraits are presented as a diptych in the gallery space, her work might be more fully read as a triptych that surfaces the unlikely historical intimacies connecting the transracially adopted Korean, the plastic Korean woman, and the primitive ethnographic spectacle together.

Ultimately, I read RHEE’s playful tarrying with racialized markers of her face and body as a means to disrupt our visual field and our assumptions of what (or who) gets to count as a “real” body and who gets to count as a “real” Korean. By playing with our expectations of what a Korean body looks, sounds, acts, and feels like, RHEE ultimately sabotages the fantasies of American benevolence and Korean modernity that attempt to resignify overseas Korean adoptees as flagbearers of Korea’s vision of cosmopolitan futurity. RHEE rejects this demand for legibility, and instead maintains her artificiality and inauthenticity. She remains intentionally inscrutable; she is out of reach, and deliberately so.

Mirae kh RHEE’s work is part of a broader set of works from the Korean diaspora that you examine. Why examine these works from the diaspora, and what do you think they can help us understand about Koreanness?

Throughout my fieldwork in Korea, I’ve witnessed and experienced a real urgency from multiple state actors to consolidate a national Korean brand — in other words, a locatable and identifiable category of Koreanness. From K-Dramas to K-Pop to K-Literature to K-Food, the global explosion and circulation of Korean cultural productions since the turn of the 21st century has assembled a highly flexible imagination of Korea and Koreanness. The ubiquitous attachment of the prefix “K” to any and all Korean goods, products, and services attempts to seamlessly cohere “Korea” into a site and object that is at once immediately legible and endlessly elastic.

The recruitment of the Korean diaspora — in particular, Korean adoptees — in the making of a “Global Korea” is one such instance. However, this global branding obscures the Korean War’s ongoing effects by papering over how foundational militarized violence has been to Korea’s state-building endeavors. And so, the diasporic Korean artists whose work I study disrupt the legibility of Koreanness, thereby calling attention to the violent histories and present realities of militarized life. I argue that this disruption functions as a form of diasporic critique that ultimately refuses reconciliation in permanent war. It feels vital, then, to turn to the diaspora and diasporic cultural producers who are grappling with the violences of war, which have shaped forces of displacement, migration, and family separation. If we are to take seriously the unended status of the Korean War, then I want to know how conceptualizations of Korean beauty get trafficked through formulations and fantasies of repair, which I argue is about more than just the body as a site of aesthetic optimization.

My attention to aesthetics and visual culture invites a serious consideration of how diasporic art heightens our attention, pressing us to think with and learn from seemingly unlikely characters, fields of thought, and geographies that would otherwise not be thought of together. From Canada to Denmark to the United States, the works I assemble are necessarily transnational in scope because I am interested in how aesthetic practices in the diaspora surface the sensorial violence of ongoing war while carving out forms of intimacy and relationality — a diasporic theorization of healing — that take up repair as a collective, expansive process. At the heart of my research is a commitment to taking seriously the profound meaning and political thrust that beauty has in our social worlds, whether or not we’re entirely tuned in to its magnitude. And so, I hope that my project might offer some openings, some other options and possibilities for thinking about what beauty means to us and our lives, and why that all matters so much.

Alumni

Anti-Mining Politics in Colombia: A Visual Interview with Ángela Castillo

Published June 25, 2024

What can the battle around a new mine in Colombia tell us about the past and future of environmentalist organizing in Latin America? Matrix Postdoc Julia Sizek interviewed Ángela Castillo, who is a recent PhD graduate from UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College in Southern California, and a member of the editorial team of Engagement, the blog of the Anthropology and Environment Society. Castillo studies environmental politics and struggles over natural resource extraction with an emphasis on Latin America, particularly Colombia. Her scholarly work explores how environmental and territorial disputes give rise to new forms of political action.

What is the Colosa gold project, and why is it controversial?

I think of the Colosa project not as a specific mining site or a corporation, but as a concentrated effort to industrially exploit one of Colombia’s largest subterranean gold deposits through an open-pit mine. From this perspective, the Colosa project is a set of operations, actors, relations, and capital arranged to extract Andean highland underground gold and transform it into a mineral resource that is sold and bought in the market. While the open-pit site has not been built as of 2024, some of the operations fundamental to bringing the Colosa project to life have included a geological exploration of Colombia’s Andean ranges, which was funded by the corporation between 2003 and 2007. This expedition put more than 100 geologists and fieldworkers to work exploring Colombia’s underground and identifying mineral deposits. After that, the corporation secured mining titles over approximately 22,000 acres in the region and started exploration activities, such as drilling and sampling, in the municipality where the deposit was located (Cajamarca, Tolima). All of these components constitute the Colosa project.

The Colosa project is unique: it was going to be one of the first montane industrialized mining sites in Colombia. Until the end of the 20th century, industrial mining had been limited to lowland areas and semi-flat areas.

La Colosa is controversial for several reasons. First, elevated areas in tropical regions harbor unique ecosystems, such as Andean tropical forests (cloud forests), páramos (high tropical ecosystems above the treeline), and tropical glaciers, and the project could impact these ecosystems. These ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots, and many rivers originate there.

Second, the project is controversial because these mountains are home to communities of small farmers, or campesinos, practicing semi-intensive agriculture with cash crops. An open-pit mine is one in which layers of the mountain are blasted and removed. Eliminating the tree coverage and different layers of soil would thus make agriculture impossible and endanger endemic animals and plants. The project was very poorly received by small farmers, people living in nearby towns, in the regional capital, and in other parts of the country. The Colosa was controversial because it was associated with the destruction of water, biodiversity, and food.

A third reason the project is controversial is the relationship between this mountain range (not specifically the zone of the Colosa, but the broader area) and the history of Colombia’s political violence and internal conflict. The mountain range has been home to both armed and non-armed revolutionary and reformist movements (some of which turned into guerrillas, while others did not). What I want to flag is that these are spaces where state territorialization has always been contested and, therefore, conspicuously incomplete. Of course, the interest in transforming the high Andes into a new mining landscape would bring all these elements into a complicated interaction.

In your research, you followed an anti-mining coalition and groups like the Environmental Committee for the Defense of Life. How did the group conceptualize their project as one of defending life?

I followed a coalition formed by different organizations, including groups like the Environmental Committee for the Defense of Life. I also track other groups in nearby towns. This coalition isn’t formal; it lacks a name and people don’t refer to it as “our coalition,” but they come together to act, which is what I consider the coalition. The Environmental Committee for the Defense of Life played a pivotal role in shaping the terms and material conditions for this type of political action. Using concepts from Black scholars like Berenice Johnson (1983)¹, I describe the work that these organizations do as “coalitional,” meaning that relations and interactions are maintained and flourish despite differences, mistrust, potential harm, and disagreements among people.

Since starting my fieldwork, I have been interested in unpacking and ethnographically elaborating the concepts this coalition uses to frame their political work. They refer to their actions as “territorial, water, and life defense.” What underpins and signals these terms? Why opt for these rather than “environmental activists”? Why have these notions gained so much traction globally?

The concept of life is particularly fascinating; my research indicates that it derives from a situated reflection of Colombia’s political history and a reflection of what is human and more-than-human life.² However, it is also a term that invites potential links and comparisons with other movements that foreground life and vitality, such as Black Lives Matter in the US or Ni Una Más in Latin America.

To understand what they mean by life, I want to mention that during fieldwork, I constantly hear from Committee members the expression, “against a politics based on death, we put forward a politics of life” (contra una política de muerte, nosotros avanzamos una política de la vida). What is being articulated here is a concrete theorization of how Colombian politics (both state and counter-state) have been defined by the use of violent means to either exterminate the politically different “other” (see the Patriotic Union Political Party state-sponsored genocide, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Decision July 27th, 2022), or to force a recalibration of political forces to promote resource redistribution or political rights, as well as to end exploitation, domination, or exclusion. When defenders invoke “life,” I identify an ongoing reflection on the role of violence in politics. However, it is not necessarily a Global North liberal perspective on violence.

Another thread in their use of the concept of life relates to a situated discussion of what constitutes human life and what defines a dignified human life. Another expression that I often hear in Tolima and other parts of Colombia is “until dignity becomes customary” or “until we are completely accustomed to dignity” (hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre). Here, they theorize that human life is considered worthy and that it commands respect. They argue that forms of human life cannot be replaced or radically transformed merely for the purpose of converting areas into extractive sites.

A final thread in their use of the concept is how they consider the relationship between human life and more-than-human life. “In defense of life” does not necessarily center human life as unique, but acknowledges that human life occurs alongside and depends on other forms of life. It is also very interesting how, for example, these defenders seldom mention the planet, the globe, or humankind. Those are notions that are not underpinning their political action, although they are up-to-date in understanding global warming and the climate crisis. However, I think the concept of life, in some ways, levels the status between who defends and who is defended, which is not necessarily present in articulations where environmentalists protect the planet.

This leads us to one of the central concepts that the movement uses to think about itself: as a proceso. What is the proceso, and how does the concept of the proceso shape their advocacy?

a group of people gathered in a meeting — In the image, we see a Facebook post by the Colectivo Socioambiental Juvenil de Cajamarca-COSAJUCA (Cajamarca’s Youth Socioenvironmental Collective) featuring a photo from one of their workshops with small farmers. The caption in the social media post, “the territorial defense process continues,” suggests that these gatherings represent the ongoing struggle and mobilization against the mining corporation. Image taken from Cosajuca’s Facebook Page, May 14, 2017.

In the image above, we see an example of the use of the notion of “proceso,” which translates as “the process.” In the image, we see a picture of an organizing event with Cajamarca’s farmers, indicating that this action is one way in which the “proceso” remains alive. A simple way to define “proceso” is that it is the local term for both the coalition they created, and also the term they use to theorize about a social movement. I never heard them talking about “our coalition” or “our social movement,” although technically, this is an example of what some literature would call new social movements oriented to environmental issues. I am still thinking through the relevance of “proceso,” and by that, I mean the theoretical, political, and affective affordances and foreclosures the term allows for defenders, allies, and outsiders. The term underscores something that is made of moving pieces, that unfolds in time, and that is goal-oriented. It is not a term that refers to formal and bounded organization, so I have the idea that when they use “proceso,” they are emphasizing three different aspects: coalitional practices to refuse the project, mutability, and post-extractive futures.

I think that “proceso” shapes their advocacy by allowing them to somewhat detach and separate from more formal organizations, and instead focus on the broad political goal. If we want to reference scholars who have thought about time, like Reinhart Koselleck (2004), we can say that “proceso” speaks to situated spaces of experience and horizons of expectation that define this coalition and its activities.

How did the proceso begin?

The proceso began in 2007 when the Colosa project was publicly announced. People recalled that they had seen white SUVs, machines, and workers going around Cajamarca (the town where the gold deposit is located). However, since Cajamarca is also crossed by one of Colombia’s most important highways, many local dwellers thought those machines were related to a road tunnel that several Colombian governments have been promising for decades. However, in 2007, former president Alvaro Uribe announced the Colosa as one of the most important mining projects in Colombia’s history and as an engine of economic development. Small farmers in Cajamarca realized that a mine was going to be built in the mountain. That was a huge shock for many of them.

In my research, I show that the initial shock was important to ignite the proceso, but there were two historical conditions that came together to bring the proceso to life. The first one is that these campesinos had been participating in different projects aimed at rethinking farming in the mountain. Although agriculture was done by smallholders, it was an intensive form of agriculture that, since the late 1980s, had been using more plots of land, water, fertilizers, and pesticides. On one hand, farmers were aware of their reliance on fertilizers and pesticides. They complained about the prices and also about the difficulties of sustaining permanent cash crops. On the other hand, environmental conservation NGOs were concerned about how these practices could impact biodiversity, the forests, and the páramos (mountain ecosystem above the treeline). In the early 1990s, NGOs arrived with different projects and initiatives, including private reserves and agro-ecological projects. Agro-ecology emphasized organic fertilizers and pesticides, better use of the soils, crop combinations, and different waste management, among other things. When the Colosa project arrived, campesinos and local NGOs had been working together for more than 20 years in a theoretical and practical critique of economic development through intensive agriculture and agricultural experiments. Small farmers in these projects were the first to protest against the Colosa and looked for allies.

The second historical condition was the presence of a group of students, professors, and researchers in the schools of biology, agronomy, and social sciences in Ibagué, the regional capital. They had been trained under professors who applied the principles of collaboration, Research-Active Participation (Investigación-Acción Participativa, a form of research created by a Colombian sociologist during the 1960s), and liberation theology. All of these emphasized a form of research based upon collaborating with communities. It implied both concrete projects and a personal disposition on how to be a scholar. When small farmers started to contact students and faculty, many of those trained in these principles openly listened to small farmers and started attending meetings and organizing events. This was the beginning of the “proceso.”

In sum, on one level, it was the articulation of small farmers and working-class members of the public regional university. On another level, it was the articulation of two traditions defined by critiques of intensive agricultural production and of apolitical scholarly research.

How does the concept of the proceso fit into the broader history of popular environmentalism, or ambientalismo popular, in Colombia?

Throughout the 20th century, Colombian public universities have been a space for scholarly traditions that embraced collaboration and shared political goals with different sectors of society.

In particular, Colombian public universities were the settings where the concept of popular classes (clases populares) emerged in the 1960s.This was an alternative theorization done by political leaders who were also researchers, professors, liberation theology activists, and even revolutionaries. They challenged theterm “working class” because, for them, it did not fully encompass sectors such as the unemployed and small farmers. They started to use popular classes and call for united fronts (frentes unidos), a sort of space that brings together different social sectors. One can see them as proto-coalitional spaces.

Many students were trained in this tradition. Relevant to the Colosa case is Professor Gonzalo Palomino, an agronomist who was deeply interested in environmental issues. When he arrived at Tolima’s public university to be a professor in the late 1970s after being trained in collaborative action research, he applied all these principles and adapted them to do research and advocacy about agriculture and environmental matters.

In doing so, he nourished a specific type of environmental advocacy and action in Colombia. Over three decades, he organized a group of students and faculty to explore environmental problems and their impacts on the popular classes, using the conceptualization coined by his mentors during the 1960s. The fieldwork and writing that resulted from these activities gave form to one of the first examples of popular environmentalism in Colombia.

Popular environmentalism took place outside of the urban and political centers, like Bogota. It was an environmentalism not performed by white Colombians doing conservation, but a kind of environmentalism practiced by low-income researchers and communities, in which ecological phenomena were thought about and explored in relation to the humans living there. The relationship of this tradition of popular environmentalism to the proceso against the Colosa is direct. Many of the students and faculty who established alliances with small farmers and who then formed organizations, such as the Committee, were directly trained by Professor Palomino in the principles of popular environmentalism. Without their involvement in this tradition, I think it would be hard for them to sustain the coalition.

This part of the research is relevant because it reveals how different sedimented histories underpin the resistance against the Colosa project. Examining the connections among these various traditions broadens our understanding of the anti-mining politics that have emerged in central Colombia. This approach moves beyond the narrow focus of some studies that highlight only a few legal actions taken by defenders against the mining company as the sole significant events in this dispute. (2024). Of course, the popular consultations or local referendums— binding legal tools that were used to ask citizens of Cajamarca and Piedras about their opinion on industrialized mining, and through which voters rejected industrialized mining — were legally consequential events. But the forms of life and political action that these defenders configured over two decades cannot be reduced to these events. My research excavates these different critical traditions cultivated amidst violence and how their articulation is fundamental for the type of coalitional action that emerged in the context of the Colosa.

How might the lessons from the proceso change how we think about social movements and coalition-building?

That is what I am trying to think about more. Established theorizations of social movements by both scholars in the North and the Global South draw on fixed notions of what social movements are and how their actions are strictly shaped by windows of opportunity that depend on the state.

As a researcher, I am halfway situated between the Global South and the Global North, so to avoid flattening this phenomenon by the term “social movement,” I decided to give proceso a conceptual chance. I wanted to see if the word can do the same for a reader that it does for defenders in their different organizing events.

When I was in the field, proceso was invoked in various settings and occasions. For instance, I heard statements like, “it is great that you want to join and help the proceso,” or “what we have to keep in mind is taking care of the proceso,” or “I’ve learned many things by being part of the proceso.” I think that the term “proceso” helps them make sense of that kind of political and care work to maintain connections between groups and even more-than-human entities, which are not fully captured by the word “social movement.” I don’t think right now that “proceso” could serve to theorize other social movements, but it could help shed light on how to theorize social movements by taking seriously the terms these coalitions use to make sense of their political labor.

What is the status of the Colosa project today, and how has the opposition to the project continued over time?

As of April 2024,, the corporation has not been able to advance the project. There are no consistent exploration activities, drilling, platforms, or sampling. The corporation still holds some mining titles, so there are billboards in the area, sometimes protected by security guards. The physical signs are marking their contested territorial claims. But there is no project currently.

However, I don’t want to suggest that the dispute ended and the mining corporation abandoned their endeavours to exploit the area; this would be naïve. Since the last popular consultation took place in 2017, the corporation has initiated dozens of legal actions to undermine the results. They have lobbied to change the members of Colombia’s Supreme Court. In 2018, a new Constitutional Court ruled against using popular consultations to intervene in the authorization of mining projects. This questioned the legitimacy of the consultation processes in Piedras (2013) and Cajamarca (2017) that stopped the Colosa project. However, the decision was not enough to legally overturn the results in Cajamarca. A very particular and contentious legal situation is currently unfolding.

Amidst that situation, the work of defending territory, water, and life has evolved into different practices: actualizing post-extractive futures via projects that ensure small farmers can produce crops in alternative ways, and defending the popular consultation results. Defending or taking care of the popular consultations’ results entails establishing alliances with lawyers to intercept or respond to the corporation’s legal actions, advocating for new legislation (such as the Environmental Democracy Law), and connecting with other procesos against the same corporation elsewhere in Colombia.

Footnotes

1. “Coalitional Politics: Turning the Century” by Black scholar, activist, and artist Berenice Johnson was published in 1983 in a volume titled Home Girls. A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. It was based on a public presentation that Johnson gave in 1981 at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival in Yosemite National Park, California.

2. Within the field of multispecies ethnography, the concept of “more-than-human” life refers to all elements of the environment that are not human but play a fundamental role in ecological and social interactions. More-than-human entities can include plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, elements, and more. Multispecies approaches in anthropology and ethnography examine and highlight the interconnected relationships between humans and other life forms.

Podcast

The Emotions of Dyadic Relationships: An Interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas

Published May 31, 2024

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas, who at the time of the interview were Ph.D. candidates in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology. The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Postdoctoral Fellow.

Jenna Wells is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the clinical science area at the University of California, Berkeley and a clinical psychology intern at the University of California, San Francisco, specializing in neuropsychological assessment of older adults. Her research examines interpersonal emotional phenomena in connection with aging and mental and physical health, with a focus on dementia caregiving relationships. She is interested in identifying factors that are associated with individual differences in caregivers’ health and well-being, and ultimately, hopes this work will inform the development of targeted, evidence-based interventions for caregivers of people with dementia.

Felicia Zerwas is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with a team at New York University on the community science initiative, MindHive. At the time of the interview, she was a Ph.D. candidate in the social-personality psychology area at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on understanding the role that emotions play in the formation and maintenance of close relationships. Since we rarely experience emotions in isolation, she examines how individuals experience and express their emotions in the presence of others, like a friend or romantic partner. Ultimately, she is interested in how those emotion related processes influence measures of relationship quality such as intimacy, perceived support, and conflict.

Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts.

Podcast Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Julia Sizek, and we’re recording in the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio. Our guests today are Jenna Wells and Felicia Zerwas, who are both Ph.D. candidates in the Department of Psychology at Berkeley.

Jenna is a clinical psychologist who studies emotion in close, older-adult relationships. Her research examines aspects of emotional functioning that are associated with health and well-being in later life. She’s particularly interested in identifying risk and resilience factors in individuals providing care for a loved one with dementia. Ultimately, she hopes that this work will lead to interventions that promote healthy aging in the face of adversity.

Felicia is a social personality psychologist whose work focuses on understanding the role that emotions play in the formation and maintenance of close relationships. She examines how individuals experience and express their emotions in the presence of others, like a friend or a romantic partner. Ultimately, she is interested in how those emotion-related processes influence measures of relationship quality, such as intimacy, perceived support, and conflict.

Welcome to the podcast, and thanks for coming today.

Jenna Wells: Thanks for inviting us.

Felicia Zerwas: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

Sizek: So both of you study the dyadic form — that is, relationships between two people. How does studying two people together differ from studying one person alone?

Wells: That’s a great question. So Felicia and I both study emotions. And emotions are inherently social. They often occur in social contexts and interaction. And so much of the work in the field of affective science, or emotion science, has really focused on studying emotions in individuals. And this is missing a big piece of the puzzle, where emotions often occur in social contexts.

So we can learn a lot about studying people in their close relationships, in dyads, in groups. And so that’s, I think, a really important area for the field to head.

Zerwas: Yeah, I agree completely with Jenna’s answer. And I also just think it’s worth noting that, like she said, emotions rarely happen without people around us. And so they are inherently social phenomena. And if we’re not capturing that social context, we’re losing a lot of the nuance that can take place.

Sizek: So as we think about this, there are different emotions and different ways that people transfer their emotions between each other. How does emotional transfer happen in these different settings that you study, like friendships or caregiving relationships or romantic partnerships?

Zerwas: So it’s interesting. There are many different ways that this can happen. And so I bring couples into the lab typically to have conversations with one another. And one common process that we see is mimicry. So if you’re interacting with somebody and you see that they’re expressing certain behaviors, you might start to mimic them, because that can actually make the process or the interaction go a bit smoother. And so that’s one process I’m familiar with. Jenna I don’t know if there are others that you—

Wells: Yeah, definitely. So building on this idea of mimicry, or sometimes people call it “emotion contagion” — this idea that like, “I catch your feelings.” I think there’s also deeper levels of that that include different forms of empathy. So there’s cognitive empathy, where I know what you’re feeling, I can understand and accurately label the emotions that you’re having.

And then there’s also an emotional empathy where I feel what you’re feeling. I feel compassion or sympathy or kind of offshoots of this. And so there’s different ways in which we share and experience and mimic other people’s emotions. And those are all important facets of how emotions occur in these social contexts.

Sizek: But it’s not always the case that people are always expressing their emotions to each other. And one of the things that you both have looked at a little bit is this question of suppression or emotion regulation. So what is emotion regulation? And how is it commonly understood?

Zerwas: Yeah, I’m happy to take a stab at that one. So emotion regulation is the way that we try to manage or change our emotions. And there are many ways that we can do this. Suppression is one that you just mentioned, which involves concealing the behavior associated with an emotion. So, for example, I might be feeling sadness. On the inside. I can label that I’m feeling it, but I might not be showing any tears or any facial expressions of sadness.

And there are many other types of emotion regulation like reappraisal, which involves trying to think about the emotional experience in a different way. So, for example, I might try to tell myself something that will make me feel better about the emotion. I’m experiencing. And then another common one that at least I’m familiar with is acceptance, which is just accepting the emotional experience and not trying to change it.

And that’s typically associated with good things, because it’s not always advantageous to try to change your emotions.

Wells: Yeah, the different types of strategies that Felicia mentioned are really big ones in the field of emotion regulation. You can think about the process of an emotion happening, being generated. And at different points in the process. You might intervene either consciously or unconsciously, to change either the way you experience your emotion or you express your emotion.

James Gross is process model is the standard in the field for understanding these different avenues for employing an emotion regulation strategy. And so like Felicia said, suppression is one that happens at the end of the emotion generative process where you, consciously or unconsciously choose to inhibit your emotional response. Either expressively, or you could even suppress thoughts or feelings or attempt to.

Sizek: And how do these different strategies differ across different people? So let’s say that you’re a person who has a lot of social power or social prestige. How might you regulate your emotions differently? Or how might gender differences change how people think about regulating their emotions?

Wells: Felicia, you’re the expert on social power.

Zerwas: Yeah. Yeah. So I do have some recent work looking at how self-reports of social power, which is different than a role that’s associated with power. So this is, my perceived social power does actually influence the way that we think about emotions. And which in turn relates to the strategies that we use. So in our paper, we actually found that people who perceive themselves as higher in social power believe that they should not have to control their emotions.

And they also believed, interestingly, that they can control their emotions. And that was associated with them using less suppression, more acceptance and more reappraisal as well.

Sizek: So what does this mean on a practical level? Like give us an example of what someone would do if they were in this high position of social power.

Zerwas: Yeah, so I think the way that we interpreted it is that if someone is higher in social power, at least they perceive that they are. It seems like they feel like they can use emotion regulation if they want to, but they don’t think that they have to or should. So it’s basically this idea that they feel like they can do what they want, which makes sense when you think about this playing out in our lives.

And especially when you consider the flip side an– or someone that’s lower in social power has to be a bit more careful about how they’re expressing their emotions or managing their emotions. And so that’s– yeah.

Wells: Yeah. Just to jump in, I think that Felicia is hitting on a really important point, which is our beliefs about our emotion, regulation, abilities or capacity really play a role in how we use or don’t use these different strategies. And so suppression is one strategy that has typically gotten a pretty bad rap in the literature. You know, people have often found associations between using expressive suppression.

So hiding or inhibiting your emotional expressions or emotional behavior that that’s typically associated with bad outcomes like more depression, and anxiety and things like that. And we recently did a study where we looked at people’s ability to use expressive suppression on command. So we told people, you’re going to see something we want you to hide how you’re feeling.

And so someone looking at you wouldn’t know what you’re feeling. And we found that those who were better at using suppression actually had better mental health. They had less anxiety. And so that goes against what we typically think about with suppression being a bad thing.

But I think it connects to what Felicia was saying, which is perhaps it’s those people who believe they can use suppression on command or they know they have this ability or talent to employ a specific emotion regulation strategy on command in the moment, that they are adapting better and potentially just faring better more broadly.

Zerwas: I completely agree with that point. And I find this point– this point to be really fascinating. Actually, I was talking to some colleagues about the fact that so many people still use suppression, even though we know in the literature it’s been categorized as this very broadly terrible emotion, regulation strategy. And so all of us were like, why? Why are people still using it so much?

And it’s because it is adaptive actually in certain contexts. But if we don’t take context into account, we lose that nuance. So I completely agree with Jenna that it’s– a big take away from the emotion regulation literature is when and how you use these strategies. Not, it’s all bad or it’s all good. It’s about can you use them in ways that help, you know, better outcomes in the situation.

Wells: Exactly, I mean, you can think of some examples, I’m sure, from your own life in which you want to hide how you’re feeling. Like if you’re at a funeral and something funny happens, you want to suppress that response, to laugh or smile in the moment, or if you’re in a social situation in which you’re really proud about something and everyone else lost.

And you need to hide how excited you are about whatever it is that happened to you. These are just a couple of examples of times in which it’s actually very adaptive and probably socially. The nuance of the situation, it’s just shows that you’re more skilled to use those suppression in those moments.

Zerwas: I see this with couples a lot, too. You can imagine having an argument with someone you’re close to. And I study mostly romantic relationships, so that’s where my mind goes to. There are certain moments where bringing up a critique, for example, is useful and constructive because for example, you might both have capacity to deal with it.

But if you’re trying to bring up the anger that you’re feeling when your partner’s having– they’re upset or sad, that might not go as well. So I do really think that there’s a time and place to express certain emotions, and it’s not always the best to just let it out.

Sizek: Yeah, so turning to this question of emotional regulation in relationships, how does that work? And what are some of the common strategies that you have seen in your research on emotion regulation in these– either caregiving relationships or romantic partnerships?

Wells: Yeah, so interpersonal emotion regulation is a whole offshoot field of this idea of emotion, regulation. And kind of getting back to the question you first asked us about studying people in dyads. I think studying interpersonal emotion regulation is so rich and important because we do lean on others to help us regulate our emotions.

Like venting to somebody is one such example. Even reappraisal, which Felicia mentioned earlier, is something that you can lean on others to help them change how you’re thinking about the emotions that you’re having and reframe things in a way that’s more adaptive or palatable to you.

So I haven’t studied this explicitly, but I think it’s fascinating, especially, when we think about– I study caregivers, so usually family members– often I’ve studied spouses who are caring for their loved one with dementia or another neurodegenerative disease. And there’s a lot of intrapersonal emotion regulation. The caregivers have to regulate themselves to keep them in a headspace where they’re able to provide care.

But I also think about this in the context of someone who you’re losing. You’re losing a loved one who may be used to be a source of interpersonal emotion, regulation for you, someone that you could bounce ideas off of. And so, I haven’t looked at specifically how this changes over time.

I think that’s fascinating. But I do have this idea or this hunch that losing a loved one for whom you used to really seek out as a source of to help you regulate your emotions can be a pretty devastating loss for caregivers.

Zerwas: Yeah, I don’t have the take of the caregiver relationship, but I do have some work that looks at how we can help our partners regulate their emotions. And we study the same three strategies that I mentioned in the intrapersonal, which is within the self. We also study those interpersonal. So how can I use those to help my partner. So there’s interpersonal suppression, which as you can imagine, not great.

If you’re trying to basically make your partner keep their emotions to themselves. That’s just overall, not a great strategy. Interpersonal reappraisal like Jenna was hinting on, it’s actually really interesting. We see that it’s not that great, actually. But it depends. It depends, though. It’s very complex. Because what can happen is if you’re trying to reappraise something which I mentioned involves reframing it to reduce the emotional impact, people can actually see it as invalidating.

It’s like, well, you don’t know what I’m going through. Or you don’t know what I’m experiencing. And so I think it really depends on the type of relationship. I think when you’ve been with someone for a long time and they understand where you’re at and what you’re going through, reappraisal can be really effective. But if you’re in a new friendship and you try to start reappraising their emotions, they might be like, whoa, wait a minute.

So typically, acceptance is a great strategy. Like Jenna was saying, validation and just allowing someone to vent and just being with them with their emotions can be really helpful.

Sizek: So this also gets us to the question of having both parties not be on the same page. We talked a lot about how there might be some contagion of the emotions between different people. If someone’s feeling really happy or someone’s feeling really sad, that is something that gets transferred relatively easily. But rather what happens when we don’t have that on the same pageness. And how does how do you study this?

Zerwas: Yeah, I don’t study the not on the same pageness as much. I will say just anecdotally, when I have participants come into the lab and discuss conflict, they generally aren’t on the same page if they’re not communicating well. And so I think one thing, again, this is anecdotal, but just from watching these experiences, if you’re not on the same page, the communication really helps.

And I think in those situations where you’re not on the same page, for example, thinking back to suppression, because we’ve been highlighting that strategy a bit, that can hurt that. And kind contribute to not being on the same page. So I think that would be my take.

Wells: Yeah, I– it’s interesting. So one way I’m thinking about how we might quantify being on the same page is sharing emotions, like having the same emotions or same type of emotions at the same time. So feeling positive together or feeling negative together. And some of the work I’ve done, we also bring couples to the lab and have them engage in a conflict conversation.

So we ask them to talk about an area of disagreement in their relationship for 10 or 15 minutes. And we have looked– So after the conversation, we have them rate from with a rating dial of how positive to negative they’re feeling moment to moment. It’s a 9 point scale. And so we can quantify the number of seconds in which both partners are saying they felt positive or negative.

And also the number of seconds in which one person was feeling positive while the other person was feeling negative. So that, I think, would be a proxy for not being on the same page, right. One person’s feeling good, the other person’s feeling bad. And we do see that these shared emotional states, both positive and negative, are very important in predicting outcomes like relationship satisfaction.

And in particular, sharing positive emotion with both partners said they were feeling positive that the accumulation, the number of seconds in which that is the case is usually predictive of better relationship or marital satisfaction. And so I think being on the same page can look different in different ways depending on how you define that.

We’re not saying that they’re necessarily feeling the exact same emotion, but that they’re both feeling positive can be pretty powerful, especially in the context of a conflict conversation where they’re not necessarily seeing eye to eye.

Sizek: This also raises a question about the different strategies we have to measure people’s emotions. So in this case, you recorded a conversation and then you had them go back and revisit the conversation in order to measure their feelings. How does this differ? And what are some of the other strategies that we have for studying people’s emotional states over time?

Wells: Yeah, so that is a big one. So that rating dial I mentioned, I think we both have looked at those data, both Felicia and I. And that’s a really interesting one, because it’s dynamic. And so it is the closest we can really get to getting people’s moment to moment emotions without stopping them every second and saying, what are you feeling now? What are you feeling now?

That would totally interrupt the flow of, of a real conversation. So videotaping it and having them watch it back and give these continuous ratings is a very useful way to get at that. Another method that I really love is behavioral coding. And so again, we videotape the conversations and then based on whatever it is that we’re interested in, there are different systems for measuring different behaviors.

So you could quantify the number of times people smiled or the number of different expressions that people do. And so that’s another– more third party way of getting at an aspect of emotional functioning, which is emotional expression and emotional behavior. Whereas the rating dial is more subjective experience. How do you say you were feeling?

Behavior is a independent way of measuring emotion in the lab.

Zerwas: Yeah, I think I agree completely with both of those and use those same approaches. The only thing I’ll add is that I don’t use this approach very often, but you can also do a daily diaries to track emotion over a longer period of time. So for example, some studies look at two week periods where couples will fill out a daily diary every night and some people will even do it two days– or two times a day.

And this can be really interesting to track things over time as well, because like Jenna was saying, typically when we’re using the rating dial in the lab, we have to do shorter time frames. We’re looking within a very specific conversation, whereas daily diaries can capture more nuanced contexts over time.

Sizek: And this gets us also to this question of how to match up these ratings of these 15 minute periods where you might have someone talking about a conflict that they have with their partner. And matching that up to longer term consequences or longer term relationships that they have, which is precisely what Jenna is studying and looking at these older adult couples.

Can you tell us a little bit more about how you try to figure out the match between short conversations that you have and then these longer term impacts?

Wells: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we brought couples into the lab. This was actually like 20, 30 years ago, where couples came into the lab and they had this conflict conversation for 15 minutes and we measured their behavior, like I mentioned, their subjective experience using that rating dial. And we also measured their physiology.

And it’s pretty amazing when you think about how much information we can glean from just a 15 minute conversation. We developed– so in the year– the last couple of years, we developed different ways of looking at that data and measuring things that we were interested in. And we were really interested in this idea of positivity resonance, which I can elaborate on.

Positivity resonance is a term that we use to refer to brief moments of interpersonal connection that are defined by 3 characteristics. So one, they both people or all people, if it’s a group, are feeling positive together, even mild levels of positivity. Both are all people are feeling positive. They are syncing up in their physiology.

So, your heart rates are increasing or decreasing at the same time. And they have what’s called caring, nonverbal synchrony. And so this is really just we are mirroring each other’s behavioral expressions. Doesn’t have to be the same exact expression. We might be moving at the same rhythm. And often these gestures or expressions are things that signal affiliation and care.

So leaning forward, nodding, head tilts, things– making eye contact or all important ingredients of caring, nonverbal synchrony. So these three ingredients, we think are defined what is a very potent, powerful moment of positivity resonance or positive emotional connection. But basically, the extent to which both partners in the couple are sharing positive emotion, they’re feeling positive together, they’re syncing up and their behavior and their physiology.

And so we measured all these different– we came up with five different ways of quantifying this. And I came in as a graduate student and we were interested in the long term health outcomes of this concept of positivity resonance. And so we actually had an elaborate way of recontacting folks from contact information they’ve given us a long time ago, looking people up in databases, going on ancestry.com to find mortality, death records and things like that.

And so once we had pretty much collected, we were able to find information from folks on their mortality, whether they were living or had passed away. And when they had passed away for about 90% of the sample, which was the sample was like 300 people. And so from all these people, we were able to measure like when they had died or if they were still alive.

And we found that couples who had more of these moments of positivity resonance, more shared, positive emotion in the lab, 30 years earlier, that predicted longer lives, increased longevity. And so I think it just speaks to the utility of this approach, which is, you know, bringing people into the laboratory under well controlled conditions and eliciting emotion.

I think that why– the reason why it was so powerful is because we brought them in as dyads. We measured their actual lives, people, how they interact with each other. These are couples discussing a conflict. This is something that probably happens every day, if not every week. And so that snapshot that we capture from the 15 minute conversation is very telling as to what their regular lives actually look like.

And so that’s, I think, why we were able to find these long term health outcomes, both in terms of health as well as longevity.

Zerwas: I have a quick follow up on that. Did you manipulate anything in the lab? Or was it more of a naturalistic conversation between them. It was a naturalistic conversation. So just, please discuss a topic about that you disagree upon for 15 minutes.

Wells: Yeah, so I just think that’s a really important point, too. When you’re thinking about trying to predict longer term outcomes for couples as well. I think I would argue that it would be difficult to find the same effects if you manipulated something in the lab. So what I mean by that is, if you had one partner use suppression but they don’t typically use suppression, it might be difficult to generalize that to what’s happening in their everyday lives.

Whereas when we bring people into the lab, like Jenna said, we are creating a more controlled environment. But we’re not, in some cases, the approaches we use, we don’t force them to behave in ways that they don’t typically. And so I think that’s why it’s more generalizable to predict these longer term outcomes over time, because it’s what they typically do in their relationship.

Wells: Exactly, yeah. It’s like a window into their everyday lives, which is pretty fascinating.

Sizek: Yeah and this also for me, this raises a question, too, about the way that, obviously, you can control a little bit in the lab. You’re not trying to control a ton, but you can’t control the rest of their lives. So how did you try to control for other aspects, for example, the economic status of the different couples who are in this study? Or other health risks that they may have come into the study with?

Wells: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we used everything that we have at our disposal to try to account for all those different aspects that people bring to the table. So we accounted for you– we had them fill out a– we had them fill out a questionnaire about their health. So we controlled in the analysis– we controlled for their sort of initial number of health symptoms.

We also asked them questions about health related behaviors. So smoking, alcohol consumption, caffeine consumption, frequency of exercise, those are all things we control for as well. Age, income, education. You know, those are all really important things to control for, because we know there’s a long literature showing that those are all very powerful predictors of health.

So all of those health related variables, we tried our best to control for. Of course, it’s not perfect. And we also looked at things that were of interest to us scientifically. So we controlled for the number of moments that they felt positive by themselves, right. To show that this is really something that’s happening at the level of the dyad, the extent to which they’re both sharing positive emotion.

That’s what’s predicting their long term health, not just having, you know, a lot of positive emotions by yourself. Similarly, we also controlled for their marital satisfaction at level at the first time point. And that’s another thing in the literature that is a pretty robust predictor of long term health. And again, we found that the effect of positivity resonance, or shared positive emotion, withstood controlling for.

Marital satisfaction in terms of predicting their longevity over the 30 years. And so we do our best as scientists to try to think of all the different confounds. But of course, I think there’s probably things we left out or things that we didn’t measure that would be useful to control for in a future study. I’m curious what you control for, Felicia, when you look at these couple related outcomes.

Zerwas: Yeah, I don’t do as much of the long-term work, because you’re working with older couples. My work typically focuses on newer romantic relationships. And so, yeah, less of the aging related type things, but we do– so for example, in the lab, we will control for the intensity of the negative emotion. To make sure that it’s– the reason that they’re reporting these worse outcomes is not just because they’re feeling more negative emotion in general, but because of the strategy that they’re using, for example.

Because I tend to focus on the strategies that people use and how that relates to how the conversation goes. So usually it’s about controlling for confound in the emotion sense.

Sizek: So obviously as people age, there’s also a likelihood that people might get dementia or have other aging related diseases, which is also something that you’ve looked at in your research, Jenna, can you tell us a little bit about how this changes these dyadic relationships that you look at and what this means for folks who are caregiving for people with dementia.

Wells: Yeah, so this is a big part of the research that I do. I’m really interested in individuals who are providing what’s called informal care, so not professional or paid caregivers, but people who are providing care for their loved one with dementia, which is an umbrella term for different types of neurodegenerative diseases that occur in later life.

And we know that dementia caregiving can be a highly meaningful experience to provide care for a loved one. And at the same time, it’s extremely challenging in a number of ways. It’s just time consuming. It’s emotionally and financially burdensome, and it’s also very devastating to watch your loved one get sick. These are neurodegenerative diseases refer to diseases that are progressive.

So it gets worse, and there isn’t a cure for these diseases. So it is just a very devastating experience. And so when we think about the ways that this impacts caregivers, I think a lot of the research has focused on different aspects of caregiving, the burdens of caregiving that are impacting caregivers, health and well-being.

And one of the really interesting and devastating changes in dementia is that people often think about Alzheimer’s disease and losing your memory. And that is the most common form of dementia. But there’s other ways in which dementia can manifest. And so one of those is that it impacts the emotional functioning, the emotions of the person with the disease.

And this can happen in a variety of different ways. Sometimes individuals who have dementia lose their ability to empathize or have empathy for other people. It can also lead to people having different displays of emotion or being disinhibited in the way that they display their emotion. Sometimes with dementia, for example, frontotemporal dementia is associated with lower disgust reactivity. And so it can lead people with the disease to behave in ways that others would find disgusting.

And so, as you can imagine, losing your loved one to this illness is not just– it’s not just sad because you’re losing somebody that you care about, and you’re having to really put your life on hold for a bit to take care of them. But you’re also seeing the person that you love and that you knew potentially for a long time really transform in front of your eyes.

And I think that can be really, really hard for, for people. And so a lot of the research I’ve done looks at spousal caregiving relationships. So caring for your partner. And so theoretically you’ve had a long relationship or you’ve had some relationship with this person before that is changing. And one thing I haven’t looked at, but I think is really fascinating is adult children, caring for their parents with dementia.

And whereas, in a spousal context in a marriage, you might think I signed up for this, in sickness and in health, but there’s a lot more role conflict, I think, for adult children, caring for their parents that they aren’t necessarily prepared for or have agreed to. And so that’s a whole other interesting area I think, that we don’t know as much about.

Sizek: Yeah, so you mentioned how often people with dementia no longer have those sorts of emotional responses that are normal. They might not notice that they do something that is perceived normally by people to be disgusting, for example. How does this affect the caregivers? And what are some of the strategies that you found are effective for caregivers, for people with dementia?

Yeah, I think that this is a big one for caregivers, because in particular, when patients – when people with dementia — are behaving in ways that are others would find disgusting, that can be really shocking and upsetting, especially when you’re in public or around strangers. And so I think it often leads caregivers to feeling embarrassed or ashamed and withdrawing from their social environments.

It’s harder to leave the house because you don’t really want to deal with an incident related to the person with dementia acting in a way that’s embarrassing or socially inappropriate. And so that can lead caregivers to be really, really isolated. And that’s something we hear about a lot, is that it can be very lonely to be a caregiver, especially later on in the disease.

And so I think, you know, in terms of strategies, it is at first, we’ve been talking about, I think acceptance is a really big one. This is a situation that is in large part out of your control. And so it’s really important to accept the things that you are feeling, accept what you can change and what you can’t change. And then secondly, like I mentioned, it’s a very lonely and isolated environment for caregivers.

And so I find that being able to call on people that you love, people you really trust, other family members, other friends to support you during this time is so, so important. Social support is really a key factor in having better outcomes for caregivers of people with dementia. And so, I think it’s helpful probably to talk to the people you love early on in the disease.

So that before it gets to the point where it feels overwhelming, you’ve arranged to have people be there for you. Either in an instrumental way, like helping you get rides to the doctor’s office or delivering groceries. But also just having someone who can be there help you with that interpersonal emotion regulation and probably just be, validating and accepting of what you’re going through.

Zerwas: I’m curious, is there any work looking at reappraisal in caregivers. Because the reason for this is because reappraisal is typically more helpful in situations that we can’t control. Whereas if there is something that we can do about the situation, usually reappraisal is not that helpful because we should actually take a more problem focused approach and try to do something about it.

But in this case, just from what you were saying, it’s so much is out of their control. So I’m just curious if there’s any work on reappraisal in that context?

Wells: There’s not a lot of work looking at specific emotion, regulation, strategies and caregivers. In fact, very few people take the approach that we take in our lab or we bring people into the lab and measure their emotion regulation under these controlled laboratory conditions. There are some works– some studies that use the method you mentioned earlier, like experience sampling or daily diary studies that look at different emotion regulation strategies.

Some of this work finds that caregivers who experience more anger, for example, have harder– have a harder time, have more mental health problems. But I think that the reappraisal is a potential strategy is something that would be really useful for future researchers in this area, especially in dementia caregiving.

Sizek: So as we wrap up, obviously both of your research has a lot to do with our daily lives. And thinking about how emotions play a role in how we live. And so what are some of the most useful things that you’ve found from your research, either from your own– from your own life? You don’t have to provide any specific examples or just generally in thinking about the role that emotions play in our everyday lives.

Zerwas: Yeah, I think a big one that I’ve taken away from just reading the literature and also the work that I’ve done is that context really does matter. I think when I came to graduate school, I was, making broad, sweeping generalizations about this is good, this is bad. And I know I already alluded to this earlier, but I truly stand by that statement that nothing really is all good or bad.

I think there’s a time and place to use different strategies, and my recent work shows that suppression can be bad for the self, but actually not for the relationship dynamic. So it’s really complex. And so I think picking your battles is actually a very appropriate phrase. There are some moments where I think it might be better to hold something in too for the sake of the social setting.

Whereas if you do that all the time, that’s not great either, because then you don’t get to feel authentic or get your voice heard. So not– I don’t know if this is helpful concrete advice because it’s like, well, I don’t know. But really, the big takeaway is I think learning to use things flexibly will be really helpful in the long term.

Wells: I totally echo that advice. Context matters. And yeah, I think one of the things that I’ve really been thinking about since doing this work, looking at positivity resonance in couples. And so this idea that the more that we’re sharing, even just a very brief moment of positive connection with other people, that there’s these long term downstream effects for health and well being.

We don’t have data to support this yet, but the theorizing suggests that these moments are powerful, also in what’s called weaker ties. So having moments where you connect over a positive emotion or a positive feeling with people in your day to day life, that is good for your health, that is a positive health behavior. Like exercising or eating healthy, doing this is something that’s good for you.

And so I find myself trying to be more open to those moments in my day to day life. I’m slightly extroverted, so it’s probably a little bit easier for me. But I think that even for introverts, this is true. And actually there’s some work that suggests that introverts can be surprised by how much they enjoy an interaction with other people.

But practical things you can do is just making eye contact with other people in your day to day life. If you’re on a run, you can maybe smile at other runners that are going past you. Or even like making eye contact with the baby in line at the grocery store. And making a silly face, or laughing with somebody, laughing with a coworker.

All these little things are actually very good for your health. And so I think that of course, it’s great to study them in our close relationships because those are the people that we interact with the most, our family members, our spouses. But I think that there’s good reason to think that those moments are also accessible to us in our entire environments and social worlds.

And so I think I would recommend folks to be more open to having those very, very brief micro moments of connection with other people because it actually can be beneficial for your health.

Sizek: Great well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and teaching us a lot about emotions.

Zerwas: Yeah, thank you so much.

Wells: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

Podcast

Sugar and the Transformation of the American West: An Interview with Bernadette Pérez

Published May 1, 2024

For this episode of the Matrix Podcast, J.T. Jamieson, a 2022-2023 Matrix Communications Scholar, interviewed Bernadette Pérez, Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Pérez is a historian of the United States who specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research focuses on migrant sugar beet workers in Colorado, and explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post-Civil-War era.

Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Pérez was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts , where she taught courses in History and American Studies. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. In 2018, her dissertation won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts. A transcript of the interview is provided below.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

J.T. Jamieson: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m J.T. Jamieson, your host, coming to you from the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio, our recording partner on UC Berkeley’s campus. Our guest today is Bernadette Pérez, an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She’s a historian of the United States and specializes in the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. Her current research, on migrant sugar beet workers and corporate sugar in Colorado, explores intersections between race, environment, labor, migration, and colonialism in the post-Civil-War United States. Professor Pérez, thank you for joining us today.

Bernadette Pérez: Thank you, J.T. I’m excited to be here.

J.T. Jamieson: So the production of sugar and the history of sugar as a commodity has occupied scholars across different disciplinary fields. So what makes sugar so interesting to scholars, and what first drew you to research sugar beets?

Bernadette Pérez: I think there are a lot of reasons why scholars have thought about sugar, and thought about how to historicize it or how to understand it as a substance and what kinds of qualities it has, and the ways in which it has been used to both flavor food and preserve it — but also, during the Industrial Revolution in Europe, to really account for a lot of European workers caloric needs, right? And so I think people have come to sugar from a lot of perspectives. Whether it’s nutritional aspects, or thinking about its complicated histories in European transatlantic colonial systems, and in the history of slavery, and really also in the history of plantation agriculture.

Especially when we think about sugar cane as being something that came with some of those first Spanish military expeditions in the late 1400s, and was part of that Spanish Imperial and colonial project in the Caribbean and the Greater Americas, I think a lot of people have been really curious about, what is that relationship between any particular commodity and imperialism and slavery? And then also, why is it that this one particular commodity has had such a powerful role in the centuries that followed, even today? And I know in the context of U.S. history, when you teach, like I do, Latinx histories, or when you teach U.S. history, particularly post-Civil-War U.S. history, you can’t talk about those histories without taking into account how the U.S. in the late 19th century really started flexing its offshore imperial muscle around that commodity of sugar in Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and Hawaii. And so I think sugar becomes something that is so fascinating and complicated and difficult, because of all of the different histories that it’s bound up in, and the way that it continues to be a pretty powerful industry globally today.

J.T. Jamieson: So as you say, sugar is really significant to histories of plantation labor, of slavery, of empire. And as such, a lot of the history of sugar production is identified with places like the American South or Louisiana, the Pacific world, Hawaii, the Caribbean. But your research shifts the geographical focus. So what was it that brought sugar production to the American West, and more specifically for you, to Colorado?

Bernadette Pérez: This actually gets back to the second part of the question you last asked, which was about what brought me to this project. And I think that what brought me to this project is in many ways bound up with that story of, how did sugar end up in the U.S. West — and not just as something you could buy at the store, but something that was produced in the U.S. West.

So just quickly, I came to this project initially as a master’s student in Latin American Studies. So I was not thinking historically at that time, but I was more interested in — and this would have been the late 2000s — this wave of anti-immigration bills that were being passed by state legislatures in the U.S. And there had been one in Colorado in 2006 called “Defend Colorado Now” that was passed. And it was really meant to be symbolic, because states don’t have the power to regulate immigration — that is the domain of the federal government, and more particularly of Congress. But they can make the lives of immigrants and undocumented people more difficult, and frustrating, and scary and vulnerable. And so that was what these policies were intending to do.

And at the time, before I started my master’s program, I had been working at a women’s clinic and I had seen how that set of policies was asking us to interact with our clients in a new way, particularly for those programs that were state-funded. So things like breast exams and other reproductive health care programs that the clinic had. And so I saw how difficult of a position that put those of us who had to start taking these policies into account and were interacting with people, and then also just how scary it made a lot of people’s lives in Colorado. And so that experience came with me into my master’s program.

And after taking, you know, a year and a half of coursework, I started to think about actually what I wanted to do my thesis on was something that was closer to home and to my own experience, having grown up in Colorado myself, and to think about that set of policies that were being passed and how it affected people. And at that point, I started going around Colorado and interviewing people who worked with immigrant organizations. I interviewed farmers. I interviewed people from immigrant communities. And one of the things that I kept hearing about — because at that time, this was a movement that was very explicitly anti-Mexican — was that if I wanted to understand anti-Mexican racism in Colorado, I needed to go back to the sugar beet industry. And that was a kind of funny, pivotal moment for me, because I was like, sugar beet industry, what is that? And I had never heard of the sugar beet industry, even though I had grown up in Colorado and my own family had migrated to the United States from Mexico in the 1920s, the same set of years when a lot of people who came to the U.S. from Mexico ended up working in the sugar beet fields across the West. But it wasn’t something that I knew about. And so I think at that point, I started to think, oh, this seems like something that is very important to the history and to the experiences of peoples that I’m trying to understand and to be able to speak more about, and that it was a history that most people didn’t know.

So even now, when I give talks on my work, I often have to start with, “okay, let me first introduce you to the sugar beet industry and sugar beets in general.” They are a crop, a very important crop. Most sugar produced in the United States today is produced from beets, not cane. And that has been the case for a little while now, and since the 1890s has increasingly been the case, in that that’s the moment when you started to see U.S. producers producing more and more sugar from beets rather than cane.

And so yeah, it felt important to me to be able to make that history more known and more visible. And for me to understand, how was it that this industry that, you know, when we think about it, and we learn about it, is much more associated with the South, particularly the antebellum period — Cuba and Hawaii and the Pacific world. And so I wanted to understand how was it that sugar came to the West and how that even happened. And that brought me on a long journey of trying to figure that out, how it was. And this is part of what my dissertation did. And part of what I’m now working into my first book.

But I decided to get at that question by following one sugar family: the Oxnards. Oxnard, California is named after the Oxnard family, actually. But the Oxnards were a kind of interesting family in that one branch of the family came from Boston, and, you know, in the 1700s and 1800s were merchants. And then the other half of the family made their money in Louisiana sugar in the antebellum period. And right before the Civil War, they ended up leaving the South and abandoning or selling their investments there, right before the war started, and ultimately ended up in the Northeast — so returning home to where some of them had been living in Boston and New York, and getting into refining Cuban cane sugar, which at that time was still slave-produced, because slavery was still legal for at least a decade after the Civil War in the United States.

And from there, I learned a bit about the corporatization of the industry and the formation of the sugar monopoly, the Sugar Trust, and how it was that middling sugar capitalists like the Oxnards, who weren’t the largest, most powerful, most wealthy sugar producers in the U.S., were really thinking about, oh, how do we get in on this if we are not a part of that baron class, right? And they were wealthy, and they were white, and they had a long history of making their money as capitalists, either as merchants or as sugar producers in Louisiana, but they were still middling.

And so I follow how they ended up going to Germany, taking a look at how German sugar producers were starting to industrialize and grow this new way of mass producing white sugar from beets. And that project, then, of bringing the industry to the West — which a lot of white settlers in the West had been interested in doing, but they didn’t have the expertise or the capital that was needed in order to make that industry successful.

And so I really look at how, when some of these sugar capitalists got invested in that industry and making it a success, that’s the point at which you start to see factories popping up, first in California, then in Nebraska, then Colorado, Utah, then across the West. And there was this whole hope for the industry that it was going to replace cane sugar, and that also it was going to help rejuvenate a number of white settler towns that had only recently been established, but that, particularly in agricultural areas, were really struggling in the 1880s and 1890s. And so the hope was that sugar beets were going to save the West.

The story is much more complicated than that. But I think how sugar comes to the West really has a lot to do with some of the internal politics within the capitalist class, and with what at that moment was a project of the federal government, taking land that it had recently acquired in what’s now the U.S. West, and making it or transforming it around white settlements, and settlements that ideally would last longer than a decade or two. And so I locate the industry at that intersection of U.S. capitalist imperialism, but also settler colonialism, and the way that the sugar industry after the Civil War was trying to reinvent itself, sometimes by changing its geography, and other times by changing some of its production practices and systems.

J.T. Jamieson: So it’s a very complex, many-sided story. We’re thinking about the growth of corporate sugar elites, growing agrobusiness, the importance of the growth of a settler empire in the American West, and then of course the workers, many of them migrant workers, who are often racialized in all different kinds of ways by these corporate sugar barons, or those people who are aspiring to be corporate sugar barons. So maybe let’s break some of these perspectives down.

So with the the corporate capitalist elite side of things, for families like the Oxnards, how much does their growing sugar empire depend on the support or assistance of the federal government or the American state? What is the relationship between growing agrobusiness in this period — the late 19th century and the early 20th century — and the growing state bureaucracy? Is the government supporting the growth of the beet industry? If they are, how so, and why?

Bernadette Pérez: That’s a great question. And I think, you know, this was a family and an industry that had long been supported by the federal government, or by state governments — so even before emancipation, in the legalization of slavery and upholding that institution, and preserving that institution, and then also through trade policy through the sugar tariff, right? So this was an industry and a family that was used to receiving support from the state for their business. When they went to the West, part of that was about following in those steps.

So this was a moment when the U.S. was getting much more interested in and invested in Hawaii, and in 1876 passed a treaty with Hawaii called the Hawaiian Reciprocity Treaty. And that was very much about reducing the cost of bringing in raw materials from Hawaii to San Franciscan ports and turning them into manufactured goods. And in this instance, it was about sugar, so bringing raw sugar from Hawaii to San Francisco’s industrial district, which was around Potrero today, and turning that into white refined sugar. And so there was the lure of that trade agreement that brought a lot of sugar capitalists and sugar workers to California.

But because of some of that competition within this group of sugar producers, and because of the fact that many who got involved in the industry, either as factory workers and then those who own sugar companies, were ethnically German, they had familiarity with beet sugar. You started to see people like Claus Spreckels in San Francisco, wondering how he might bring European beet sugar to the West, and really capitalizing on the fact that there were a lot of Mexican ranchos — these huge estates that had been carved out of the missions, and then granted in some instances to elite wealthy Mexican citizens before the U.S.-Mexico war in 1848, and in other instances had been sold. The 1870s to 1880s is a moment when those large estates are oftentimes going into foreclosure, and the landowners are going bankrupt and losing those estates. And so what you saw was this new class of settler-capitalists who saw that there was land very cheap, and were acquiring it, and often acquiring huge tracts of land. So it’s not like they were just buying 160 acres; they were buying tens of thousands of acres, sometimes more than that.

And so, that is something that Claus Spreckels did. And he was thinking about how to bring plantation-style agriculture, because he was somebody who by that point, the late 1880s, had monopolized the sugar industry in Hawaii. And he was thinking, how do I bring that kind of production to California? And so you see him starting in the mid-1880s, and really until 1890, thinking about how to make that a reality, and to adapt that Hawaiian plantation model to California. He was also somebody who brought in some of his own Japanese and Chinese workers on his steam shipping company, right? So he facilitated labor migration of Asian workers from Hawaii to California. And then you also have to think about these Mexican ranchos as not just being estates owned or lived on by a single wealthy family. These were often estates that many, many people lived on, including resident workers. And then also many people who had been Mexican citizens and also California Indigenous people, who didn’t necessarily respect the lines of property, in that they lived where they were able. And they had, in some instances, creative working relationships with the estate owners, and others kind of disregarded whoever the landowning family was.

And so when those big estates were bought by people like Claus Spreckels, a lot of people who had been living on those huge expanses of land were now suddenly dispossessed and having to find new ways to survive and to create livelihoods. And so that’s the moment where you start to see the kind of emergence of this Asian, Mexican, and Indigenous migrant labor force — not just in sugar, but in a lot of industries — the citrus industry, for example, and in railroads and lumber camps, right?

So there were a lot of industries that relied upon these communities as workers. But the sugar industry was also one. And and that was very much what also brought sugar producers not only to the West, but then from California, brought them to start looking inland, away from the coast, towards inland California, or Nebraska, or — in the case of my research, I focused more particularly on Colorado — towards Colorado, and thinking about how to adapt some of these existing production systems, from Hawaii or from the Caribbean or from Eastern Europe, to places that were recently in the middle of massive dispossession of Indigenous peoples and former Mexican citizens. And so this all happens around that time. And that’s how you come to see a very kind of racialized and differently racialized migrant working class.

J.T. Jamieson: So the working class that you’re examining, as you say, was often a migrant working class, involving dispossessed Indigenous people, Mexican workers, later Japanese workers, and sometimes also white or Western European workers. What is the relationship that these corporate capitalist elites build with this workforce? Are they trying to implement some kind of disciplinary regime over them? Are they trying to control their labor in any particular ways? How do they interact with their workforce?

Bernadette Pérez: The Oxnards, as an example, build their first — well, actually, they build two factories around the same time. And the first one, they start to build in what is now Chino, California. But they halted in the middle of the planning process and decide instead to build that first Oxnard factory in Nebraska, in Grand Island. And, you know, within a year or two, they have two factories in two very different locations. And part of the rationale for that has to do with labor, and also has to do with the power — or the growing power — of white farmers at that time. In Chino, Henry Oxnard went into business with a man named Richard Gird, who owned what had once been Rancho Chino, this big, former Mexican ranch. And he was trying to recruit white farmers to settle it and to create this new town of Chino, but was finding settlement to be pretty slow. And he was also experimenting with other ways of making the land profitable. So first, it was run as a ranch. But the 1880s is a moment where the meat market really kind of takes a dip. And so there was an effort on his part to rethink what to do with Rancho Chino. And that’s part of how Henry Oxnard ends up there.

The problem, from their perspective, was that at that time, there was a pretty violent anti-Chinese movement in California. And so the question was, how do you create a labor-intensive new industry in a way that doesn’t draw the attention of new white settlers, and doesn’t bring a kind of violent mob attack on their part? Because that was happening across the state. And so they were thinking about, okay, how do we maybe rent the land to tenant farmers? Maybe we find sharecroppers, whether these are European immigrants, whether these are white American settlers from more Eastern places. Maybe we farm it ourselves using company managers. And Oxnard’s first sugar companies took all of these approaches.

I think that context of anti-Chinese violence in California led him and his investors to think about building that first factory in Nebraska instead. And it’s not because they thought, oh, maybe we are going to be able to refigure this industry around white farmers and eliminate the need for a lot of agricultural labor at very particular moments of the crops’ cultivation. That just wasn’t possible, because the reality was that cultivating sugar beets — while different from cultivating sugar cane — was very labor-intensive, and there was no getting around that. But because the Oxnards had recruited a lot of sugar experts in Europe, from Germany, and from that area where Germany and Poland and Russia borderlands intersected, a lot of his agricultural workers had experience with an ethnic community called German-Russians, who were ethnic Germans who had gone to Russia in the 1700s, invited to colonize and create agricultural communities in the Volga region, as well as in the Black Sea region. And by the 1880s, and even before that, they were facing persecution in Russia. And so a lot of people from those communities ended up leaving, either returning to Germany or going to other places around the world, oftentimes to white settler nations like the United States.

So there were a lot of German-Russians living in Nebraska at that time. This is the late 1880s, early 1890s. And these were rural people. They were agricultural people. They were often communities that had very large families. And so part of the draw of bringing Oxnard and his investors to Nebraska was how to capitalize on some of the federal infrastructure, and these new administrative entities like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and land-grant colleges that had these new research capacities to help troubleshoot growing new crops in the West, how to capitalize on that whole scientific and state infrastructure, while also addressing the labor question. And that’s exactly what they did, in that the rhetoric that they used as they were building that first factory in Grand Island was all about white farmers and what the industry was going to do for white farmers, at a time when white farmers were in revolt. This is the moment of the populist movement, where white farmers were very much building a third party, and were thinking about how to force capitalism and the U.S. federal government to listen to their needs and concerns, and to restructure the economy and the nation’s infrastructure in ways that would benefit them, and not just the baron class.

So that was the rhetoric — “we’re going to Nebraska to help white farmers” — but the reality was that they were interested in drawing upon that infrastructure, and then hiring migrant workers from a community that in Nebraska was looked down upon in very discriminatory ways. German-Russians in Nebraska were considered to be lesser whites. They were seen as being undesirable. And they were confronting barriers around their own social mobility into jobs that would give them a better quality of life. And so they were oftentimes restricted to some of the more poorly paid positions. That was part of what brought the company to Nebraska.

And so it was very much about the support of the federal government in terms of its research capacity, and also that there were immigrant communities that the industry could bring in to a fairly coercive labor system, where there was a lot of effort on the part of this company — and really the industry at large — to separate out and control different communities within the industry, whether it was white farmers, whether it was diverse immigrant workers, or Indigenous workers. In Nebraska, for instance, almost immediately, Oxnard’s labor manager started recruiting at Indigenous, Native American boarding schools that were federally run at that time. Same in California. And thinking about how to use these different communities against one another, so that you wouldn’t see any particular one starting to organize in order to gain ground against the company. And so there was a very kind of conscious effort to racialize different parts of production, from the field work, to the the position of the farmer, to the people who carried out different jobs in the factories, and so on. And I can talk more about some of the systems that develop over the 20th century around different communities as the industry expanded later on, if you like.

J.T. Jamieson: Well, so as the industry does expand, later in your story, you also begin to talk about labor movements and civil rights movements and coalition-building across all of these different populations of workers. So how do those labor movements form? At what point do they form? At what point, from the perspective of workers, do they start to agitate for labor and civil rights?

Bernadette Pérez: So some of the first movements that form very early on have a lot to do with populist and nativist politics in California, Nebraska, and Colorado. In Nebraska, you saw white mob actions against Chinese workers who were hired to work on Rancho Chino. In Nebraska, you saw the Knights of Labor and the Farmers Alliance turning on the sugar industry because of its hiring in Eastern European immigrant communities, and also its hiring of Indigenous workers from the Indian School and also from reservations in Nebraska. And then in Colorado, you saw from the very first year that the first factory in Colorado opened, this movement against the company’s practice of recruiting agricultural workers from Mexican and Indigenous communities. Those non-white agricultural workers, also from the very beginning, engaged in their own forms of resistance politics, or of movement-building politics. But they often looked different than what we often associate with agricultural labor movements today, which are often talked about in relation to the United Farm Worker movement, and strikes and boycotts.

In some of the early years, and particularly in the Colorado context in the first few years, there were a lot of people recruited to come work in the industry from the Pueblos and from the Navajo Nation. And the conditions that these native workers found themselves in Colorado did not reflect what they had been promised. And so their response to that did not look like a collective labor movement, in that everybody who was working in the fields made a move towards building some kind of collectivity or union. But you did see, particularly along lines of community, efforts to stage acts of resistance, to pull the Office of Indian Affairs and Indian agents into their working conditions, and try to get the Office of Indian Affairs to involve themselves in their efforts to, say, reclaim wages that they had not been paid, or to make farmers or the company provide better access to food and water.

And then in other instances, it was just people deserting — so leaving. And I think that there’s a way to think about those as an important part of the history of labor politics, and in this case, how it intersected with sovereignty politics, the right of Indigenous nations and workers to accept work on their own terms, and to leave work on their own terms. And then you started to see, particularly in ethnic Mexican communities during the Mexican Revolution, a growing move toward some kind of worker collectivity. Because in the region that I study in Colorado, the southeastern part of the state, the Arkansas Valley, it wasn’t that far from the coal mining fields. And a lot of the workers who worked in the industry were not always a part of the IWW or other labor organizations, like miners unions, but they knew people who were, or there had been outreach efforts on the part of those labor organizations to try to organize and bring agricultural workers into the IWW (the International Workers of the World) union.

So the Mexican Revolution was really important for that shift. And by the 1920s, you started to see a growing push for creating a beet workers union, which workers started to do in 1927 and 1928. And over the next few decades, you saw that unionization effort intersecting with a lot of other communities in Colorado and across the West’s efforts to reform or reimagine what the role of the state should be, and also to reform the relationship between workers and capital, or to change that relationship, or in some instances, depending on the organization, abolish that relationship, right? And so in the 1930s, for example, you saw social reformers who were not super radical, but they were invested in ending child labor practices, for example, and improving conditions for agricultural workers in Colorado, collaborating with other organizations and beet workers themselves, and having a larger conversation around what it would mean to do this work in a way that these workers and their families could live lives of dignity and what would that take, and what needed to be done.

And this was a really interesting moment, the 1920s and 1930s, because there were a lot of different radical and social progressives, basically, who were interested in thinking about how to work across their differences. And so you did start to see some multiracial coalitions and collectives coming out of that moment in the industry in the 1920s and 30s. And that goes into the 1940s. But in the 1940s, you really saw a kind of violent response on the part of farmers and sugar companies, and then also the federal government, to disempower agricultural workers and unions. And a lot of this was done under the cover of the Red Scare.

But I think that this is important because, when we talk about the Civil Rights Movement — people often talk about it as a movement, rather than a set of movements, but I think that there’s a way to think about it as a set of movements, many of which had much longer histories — and that in Colorado, and in the West, really goes back to this earlier period. And some of the coalitions and ideas that were coming out of the Mexican Revolution, the workers’ internationalism of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, and that we can’t understand what happened in the 1960s and 70s without going back to that earlier period, and that they set really important precedents, or also laid the groundwork for some of these later movements. And just to give you an example, the Chicano movement was a set of movements that all came together in the 1960s. But one part of that movement came out of Denver, and the Colorado Crusade for Justice was this organization that was headed by a man named Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez in Denver, and was really important to the emergence of one part of the Chicano movement, in that the National Chicano Youth Conference was held in Denver in 1969.

But he himself had a relationship to the sugar beet industry, in that different family members of his had worked in the fields. I think he himself had. And if you look at some of his writings, he references that experience of being a beet worker, and the injustice and violence of that experience being a really important motivating experience for his activism later. And so I think you can think about that at a larger scale, in that those communities who worked in the beet fields, they were not individual workers. By the 1910s, it was largely whole families working together. And so this was a labor experience that whole families — men, women, and children — all experienced together through generations, and was a series of really difficult and violent contexts that then was really important to the kinds of demands that they were making later on in the century.

J.T. Jamieson: You tell a history of race, of empire, of capitalism, and of labor, but you’re also telling an environmental history and a history of the land itself. So maybe we can conclude with thinking about the beet and what the environmental challenges or consequences were in Colorado for planting beets. So what was the ideal beet? And what challenges did workers or corporations face when trying to cultivate it?

Bernadette Pérez: So sugar beets were a crop that were developed from common garden beets, like the beets that you eat in your salad, right? But that over a kind of process of hybridization and agricultural research and development were separated from garden beets and deemed to be their own separate kind of beet, the sugar beet, which is a much larger beet and is a much more sugarful beet, and was a crop and still — well, now it’s different in that sugar beets are genetically modified, and they’ve been adapted in all kinds of ways. But at that time, they required pretty significant amounts of water, they needed a lot of labor, and part of the labor had to do with the nature of beet seeds, in that they were multi-germ seed balls. And so when you plant one of these seed balls, you would get a lot of sprouts all at once. But in order to produce a single beet that was easy to process into sugar, workers had to, on their hands and knees, pull out all of these little sprouts, so that there would only be one single sprout that seemed to be the strongest sprout standing. And so that required a lot of work called “thinning” that happened early on in the season. And there was also a lot of work as the beets grew throughout the season — to weed them, and to make sure that they had all of the nutrients and environmental conditions that they needed in order to grow as best they could. So there was a lot that companies and their government allies put into reshaping the land around the needs of beets.

And the thing about Colorado and the high plains is that it’s a really arid environment where there’s not a lot of water. And so it required expansion of irrigated agriculture. And it also was built on the premise or the hope that you could forecast what each season was going to look like, right? And that ideally, each season and its weather and its water and precipitation would ideally fit the needs of the crop. But the reality, on the high plains, was that there were huge extremes in temperature. There were often long periods of drought, and then sometimes drought would be interrupted by deluges that would cause floods. And so there was a lot of environmental contingency involved in producing agriculture in that part of the plains.

And growing beets on the plains was actually pretty complicated. And it’s interesting, because nobody ever asked the question of whether this was the most appropriate agricultural system to be devising for that particular environment. The idea was more, this is a great idea. It’s going to create a lot of wealth. It’s going to root white settler communities on the plains. And it is going to develop the West’s agricultural infrastructure. And the reality was that what the outcome fell short of expectations, and it was actually very hard to produce beets in the ways that factories and companies wanted them, in the amount that factories and companies wanted, in a way to sustain the growth that they had prophesized. And this was also an industry that put a lot of risk, or built a lot of risk, into farmers contracts. And so farmers had to bear a lot of the risk of agricultural production. And that became a really political question about who was responsible for what got framed as the shortcomings of nature, those ways in which nature or the land intervened in unproductive ways or disrupted production, or killed acres and acres of beets, whether it was because of drought, or floods, or pests or diseases. And the question became, who was responsible when nature didn’t behave in the way it was supposed to?

And so you saw the response to that happening in ways that were highly racialized, in that some communities were able to go to the federal government or state governments and receive support when things failed. And other communities — and in this instance, agricultural migrant workers — were often made to bear the burden of what got termed nature’s failings, but I think we can really think about as being the failings of capitalism and of aspirations for what the land was going to do for white Americans and ideas of how the land was supposed to just behave, or that it could be transformed and improved in ways to make it behave and act the way that white farming communities wanted, which really was contrary to the actual nature of the land, and particularly in that place in that it was highly unpredictable.

And there was a lot environmentally that made growing beets in that region very difficult. And the way that that conflict was, in a sense, resolved between white farmers and companies was often by placing then the risks and the burdens of production, and really the failures of the industry, on to Indigenous and Asian and ethnic Mexican agricultural working communities in ways that had pretty serious consequences in terms of those communities’ welfare, and also, really profound consequences or outcomes in terms of what those communities started to organize around in terms of what they deserved, and what kinds of lives, in terms of like creating working lives that mattered to them, right? Or creating community structures and institutions that spoke to their own needs, or in the instance of Indigenous workers in the southwest, how to create economic lives in ways that supported community needs and Indigenous Nations’ needs, as opposed to enriching non-Indigenous communities at their expense. And so those became the kind of social and political questions that came out of this industry, and some of the expectations that sugar companies and farmers had for what the land was going to do for them.

J.T. Jamieson: Well, Professor Pérez, thank you so much for sharing your fascinating, complex research with us today.

Bernadette Pérez: Well, thank you, J.T. It’s been a pleasure.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu

Culture

Confiscated Objects of the Cultural Revolution: A Visual Interview with Puck Engman

Published March 29, 2024

China’s Cultural Revolution aimed to reshape the social and political order of China by purging elements of feudalist and bourgeois society, including through confiscating property. In 1966, millions of objects were taken from homes by independently organized and unofficial groups associated with Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary movement that supported the revolution. But what happened to the objects after they were seized?

Puck Engman, Assistant Professor in History at UC Berkeley and a historian of China in the postwar era, talked with Julia Sizek about the lives of these objects. More broadly, his research concerns the reorganization of state and society in the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China, and the transition from command economy to market economy at the end of the 20th century.

This interview is based on Engman’s publication, “What Right to Property When Rebellion is Justified?: Revolution and Restitution in Shanghai,” which is published in Justice After Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China.

During the Cultural Revolution, China’s Red Guards confiscated so-called “feudal” and “bourgeois” property from private citizens. Your research shows how this confiscation happened in practice. What did this seizure look like on the ground?

A group of men on the back of a truck with confiscated property. — Images from the “Cultural revolution video collection.” Courtesy of the H.C. Fung Library, Harvard.

The late summer of 1966 is known among historians of China as “Red August” due to widespread violence and vandalism. This involved Red Guards raiding and ransacking hundreds of thousands of homes across China. “Red Guards” was the name used by the youth organizations that had formed at universities and schools around the country to join a new political movement: the Cultural Revolution. In August, they began entering private homes, often humiliating, threatening, and even beating up residents in the process. While their primary aim was to uncover evidence of counterrevolutionary plots, they more often came across items such as bronzes, books, watches, pianos, and rugs. They seized such items all the same on the grounds that they were vestiges of feudal tradition or bourgeois lifestyle.

I became curious about what happened to all these confiscated belongings. We are talking about literally tons of gold and silver, and millions of books and antiques. Where did it all end up? This question had me follow a paper trail that led away from the street-level politics that we picture when we think of the Cultural Revolution, into storage rooms and warehouses where the objects were stored. Here, I discovered the other side of looting, the bureaucratic side, where the concerns were with logistics, storage space, and ultimately restitution.

The shift of perspective to the bureaucratic side made it clear to me that party and state played an active role in the looting. In fact, when the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee set up a new government in the city, in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, one of its first priorities was to set up a group dedicated to the handling of confiscated belongings.

What were some of the practical challenges that came with seizing private property?

The Mahavira Hall in the Jade Buddha Temple

list of confiscated possessions in Tianjin — A sealed suitcase containing seized possessions.

I should start by pointing out that the confiscation of personal belongings during the Cultural Revolution was a major departure from the established script for mass movements. If there was such a thing as a normal operating procedure in Maoist politics, this was not it. This made it easy, in the years after Mao’s death in 1976, for the new political leadership to declare the house raids illegitimate, one of many excesses of the Cultural Revolution.

This would not have been possible before Mao’s death. Mao was the main author of the Cultural Revolution and an enthusiastic and public supporter of the Red Guards.

From day one, however, the sheer amount of confiscated items presented a logistical problem that local governments could not ignore.

In the city of Tianjin, the loot was enough to fill 52 warehouses, or the equivalent of about 60,000 square meters of storage space. The situation was even worse in Shanghai, where there had been over 10 times the number of house raids that had been reported in Tianjin.

Officials in Shanghai had to get creative to solve the storage crisis. They were able to take advantage of the shutdown of places of worship in the Cultural Revolution: churches and temples became makeshift warehouses, as did a colonial-era entertainment complex in downtown Shanghai. The entire east wing of the Jade Buddha Temple, measuring over a thousand square meters, became a storage space for seized antiquities.

Many seized items remained in such impromptu storage sites for years. When owners were finally able to retrieve their belongings, they would sometimes find that an elegant dress had been ruined by rainwater leaking in from the ceiling or that a scroll painting had been ruined by mildew. The political leadership was aware of this problem. In fact, only months after the raids, concerns about the upcoming rainy season prompted the very first Communist Party directive on the handling of confiscated goods, “which was primarily an order to hand over the loot to the proper authorities, but also opened for limited restitution for working-class household. This was, however, a problem without a quick fix.

What were some of the common paths for these objects to take after they were confiscated, and what are the traces of objects that you have found in the archives?

A coupon used for the procurement of confiscated goods.

In Shanghai and other major cities, the Red Guards delivered their loot to local factories, schools, and government offices by truckloads. Responsibility for processing all these objects was shared across several arms of the local administration.

All contraband had to be handed over to the police. This included the firearms that Red Guards would display, proudly, as evidence of the counterrevolutionary plots they had thwarted. Much more common, judging from the documentation I have seen, were mahjong sets. Gambling was illegal in China at the time, but remained widespread and a low priority for the police. But for the Red Guards, gambling symbolized that reactionary attitudes were still prevalent in Chinese society. The movement was possibly the most extensive clampdown on gambling in Chinese history.

A unique challenge was presented by the confiscation of rare books and antiques. Historian Denise Ho has studied how cultural workers committed themselves to cultural preservation in the midst of the movement’s iconoclasm. Building on her work, I have looked at the decisions that went into separating common trinkets from cultural heritage. Lesser antiquities, mostly from the 18th and 19th centuries, were approved for export. In addition to lessening the burden for museums and libraries in China, such exports promised to generate foreign exchange, a rare and highly coveted resource for a country that had been cut off from much international trade. A great deal remained in the warehouses, but the artwork that made its way to Hong Kong was enough to shake up the local art market in Hong Kong, which was suddenly flooded with new items.

Chinese documents show that rare antiques were sometimes recovered by the Shanghai Museum from Hong Kong. Other objects likely remain in poorly documented private collections in Hong Kong or have become part of collections around the world. It is hard to say. Today, art museums are expected to investigate how objects looted by the Nazis were acquired and, increasingly, objects taken under colonialism. As far as I know, there is no provenance research related to looting in the Cultural Revolution

Most items were uninteresting to libraries, museums, or art collectors in China. Such items might instead have ended up in resale stores. The terms and conditions of the trade in confiscated goods were set by local governments. A rationing coupon from Tianjin reads:

Can only be used for the purchase of commercial items from the handling of confiscated goods;
Cannot be tampered with;
Cannot be copied, resold; offenders will be punished according to the law;
Keep safe, will not be replaced if lost;
Take note of the validity period, invalid upon expiration.

The coupon was issued by the Tianjin Confiscated Goods Commercial Acquisition Group. This and other similar groups were responsible not only for setting the terms of trade in confiscated goods, but also for deciding how the items should be priced.

Strong similarities of procedure from one city to another suggest a high degree of coordination in the handling of confiscated goods from the start. As for the trade of seized items, the best we can do at this point is to say that it occurred. What the scope of this trade was, domestically and internationally, is still to be determined.

In some of the cases, possessions that were confiscated ended up being returned to their original owners, which is known as restitution. What did this process look like?

List of confiscated property, Chuansha County

Form used for compensation for wrongfully confiscated possessions.

There has been very little research on restitution in the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. One of the primary reasons is that historians have assumed that restitution did not begin until after Mao’s death in 1976, when the Chinese Communist Party declared that the Cultural Revolution had been an error.

I have found instead that restitution began very soon after the raids, although it was limited. A form for approving the return of confiscated belongings, used in Shanghai in 1967, allows the owner to be identified not just by name and address, but also by their class status. The box for “class status” is significant because at this time, the Chinese Communist Party restricted restitution to those with a “good” class background, like workers and poor peasants. In one example from 1967, a Shanghai woman of “bourgeois” class was allowed access to her confiscated savings, but only because she was ill with cancer and needed to pay for her medicines. When bank officials discovered that she had also been given access to foreign currency, they determined that the request had been part of an enemy plot. Occurrences like this one were probably not common, but as long as restitution was framed in the language of class struggle, there was a certain risk associated with claiming one’s belongings. Over the next few years, the evaluation of who was — and who wasn’t — entitled to restitution changed.

How did the categories of who was entitled to restitution change?

Broadly speaking, we can identify two moments that expanded the scope of restitution. At both moments, the key question was who belonged among the People of the People’s Republic of China, by which I mean the members of the political community as opposed to the enemies of the revolution.

The first expansion began in 1969. This was when the mass mobilization phase of the Cultural Revolution ended. The Communist Party switched into a corrective mode, restoring some of the institutions and principles that had been disrupted in the earlier stage of the movement.

Around 1969, local governments began to extend restitution to members of the old elites: former government officials, religious leaders, capitalists, and intellectuals. These groups had enjoyed some protection from the Communist Party before 1966 but had become targets for the Red Guard attacks. A further push in this direction came in 1971, when Mao Zedong approved a recommendation to expand restitution to the old elites. This was a signal from the highest authority that these groups were no longer to be treated as enemies. Two years later, Shanghai had returned 56 percent of belongings seized from capitalist households. By 1975, this had increased to 70 percent — more than 33,000 households.

The second expansion came in 1978, at the beginning of the post-Mao reforms. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the People’s Republic of China will recognize this year as a watershed for class politics. The Communist Party ended most forms of class discrimination and described class as a historical category rather than a political label.

For restitution, this meant that anyone who had been affected by the house raids was, technically, eligible for restitution, regardless of class background. In practice, things were more complicated, as many belongings had been lost or damaged. Trickiest of all was the return of families to homes from which they had been evicted. Many disputes over housing continued well into the 2000s, and grew increasingly fraught when the price of real estate took off.

Foreign students visit a Red Guard exhibit in Beijing, 1966

As you mentioned, this is a different way of thinking about restitution. How does this narrative of restitution processes change how we think about the Cultural Revolution and the period that came after it?

I would highlight two takeaways. The first is that we need to rethink the chronology of the Cultural Revolution, which is still thought of as a 10-year period starting with the Red Guard movement in 1966 and ending with Mao’s death in 1976.

Looting and restitution does not fit this framework. The ransacking of private homes only lasted for a few weeks in late summer of 1966. The loot remained in warehouses as the Cultural Revolution took a different direction, shifting focus from reactionary objects to revisionist tendencies within the Communist Party. But the loot did not stay there until 1976. My research shows how renewed efforts to reunite belongings with their owners after Mao’s death followed considerable initiatives at an earlier stage. Here, the watershed moment was not 1976 or 1978, but 1969, when the Cultural Revolution entered a less radical phase, and China started to improve relations with Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States.

The second has to do with our tendency to associate successful restitution efforts with strong property rights. I’m not sure how strong the connection really is. In the Chinese case, restitution seems to have been relatively successful, despite private property rights being virtually irrelevant both before and after Mao’s death. In 1987, the Supreme People’s Court issued an opinion stating that any case related to compensation for Cultural Revolution house raids should not be handled like an ordinary civil case, and should not be handled in court. In other words, the basis for restitution was not a legal right, but party policy. This meant that individuals had little recourse if the party denied their claim, yet the lack of property rights did not have a major impact on the overall scope or expediency of restitution. Logistics and politics were far more important.

Podcast

Authoritarian Absorption: An Interview with Yan Long

Published January 13, 2024

This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with Yan Long, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley who focuses on the politics of public health in China. She was formerly an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. She obtained her PhD at the University of Michigan and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees at Beijing University.

Matrix Social Science Communications Scholar Jennie Barker spoke with Long about her forthcoming book, Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Infectious Disease Politics in China. In the book, she examines how foreign interventions aimed at tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China in the 1990s and 2000s affected the Chinese public health system, government, and society both in ways that the interventions did and did not intend.

Listen below, or on Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is included below.

Podcast Transcript

Woman’s Voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jennie Barker: Hello, and welcome to The Matrix Podcast. I’m Jennie Barker, your host, coming to you from the Matrix office on UC Berkeley’s campus. Our broad topic today is on public health in China. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, what affects when and how a government responds or does not respond to public health crises has been a pressing question in the news and beyond.

Some questions that people are interested in are if the regime type of the government matters, such as is it a democracy or autocracy? Does the ideology of the government matter? Does it matter what resources the government has? So this big question is one that our guest today, Yan Long, is addressing in her forthcoming book, Authoritarian Absorption– The Transnational Remaking of Infectious Disease Politics in China.

In the book, she examines how foreign interventions aimed at tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in China in the 1990s and 2000s affected the Chinese public health system, government and society, both in ways the interventions did and did not intend.

Yan Long is an Assistant Professor in the sociology department here at UC Berkeley. She is coming to us from Indiana University, where she was an Assistant Professor, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, where she was a postdoctoral fellow. She holds a joint PhD in Sociology and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, and a master’s and bachelor’s degree from Beijing University. Welcome, and thank you for coming to our podcast.

Yan Long: Thank you very much for this opportunity. I’m very happy to be here to share my research.

Barker: So let’s start our conversation today by getting into the developments in global politics that set the stage for your study of public health in China. In your book, there are two parallel developments that you focus on, the first being the rise of foreign aid from Western governments, and the second being HIV/AIDS activism going global. So can you speak a little bit about the beginnings of these interventions from foreign governments in general and how HIV/AIDS became a big focus for these interventions?

Long: OK, this is actually a quite complicated question. So let me see if I can simplify the historical setting. So what I study about the foreign intervention in China, it happened in a background where global health has really taken the stage and entered the political agenda of international relations. And that did not happen until the late 1990s.

So there are several things, I would say three things happening at the time. So one of the thing is that since the 1980s that all international relations scholars are very familiar with is that the world has watched the rise of transnational governing rules and norms that really forbid, permit, or require particular kinds of government regulations or governing arrangements in different areas, such as finance, security, food, urban development, labor, gender, human rights, et cetera.

So nation state no longer enjoys the ultimate authority in those areas. So that has been the general trend outside health. But we would say that actually in the 90– even until the 1980s, health was so marginal. I mean, people did not think of health as important.

But at the time, there was also a very important shift, which is people start to think– I’m talking about people. I’m talking about the World Bank. We’re talking about development or development banks, those kind of important financial institutes start to think that health is actually really important for development. If you want to establish oversea markets, if you want economic development, you need to have health first. So that’s a major thing.

But then when it comes to HIV/AIDS, especially health, in the time, I’ll just say it wasn’t until the late 1990s when the United States started to take interest in HIV/AIDS. That was started in the Clinton administration. And America was convinced that, OK, HIV/AIDS, that was going on in Africa actually for a long time.

But then it became a security threat. So the US government was convinced, OK, this is something we need to intervene. So it began to lead this campaign to push HIV/AIDS into, for example, the Millennium Development Goals. So HIV/AIDS was the first disease that was put on political agenda.

China and Russia were very much against it, the sort of politicization of the disease, they were very much against it. But the US had made up its mind. And then you would see the Bush administration started the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

So that was the time when American government began to say, OK, we are going to assume the leadership in global health. That was a very important term. Then the third sort of background I would emphasize is that, again, going back to America, many of you probably know that San Francisco was the horrible center of AIDS activism in the 1980s when the government was not going to intervene in the sort of gay disease.

So American activists, especially gay activists, had to play a very important role in terms of the AIDS activism, how to do it. And then they were also the ones who worked with activists in the global south, such as those in South Africa, to really push HIV/AIDS onto the political agenda. So that’s very important to keep in mind.

It wasn’t just the US government suddenly began to say, hey, HIV/AIDS is important. No, there was a decade of efforts from the activists from the bottom up to push it onto the political agenda. So those were the three, I would say, three background I would emphasize.

Barker: So thank you so much for untangling that complicated question I asked you. And I think we saw and as you document in your book that this focus on HIV/AIDS activism was particularly strong in the case of China. So you had these foreign interveners coming in, and HIV/AIDS was a big focus. So why did China become such a focal point for this type of activism and this type of intervention? So why was China where a lot of this focus was?

Long: OK, I’m going to tell a very cynical version of the story. So, first of all, AIDS activism didn’t start just bottom-up in China. It didn’t originate from inside China. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were some sporadic sort of efforts in China to push for AIDS activism. It was not successful.

But things took a turn in 1999 when US embassy in China began to investigate the HIV/AIDS pandemic in China. So one of the things I want to say is that so China’s largest HIV/AIDS outbreak took place in early 1990s. So it was already– it was taking place. Nobody was taking interest in it.

The outside world certainly knew about that epidemic, which was very specific to China because it occurred among commercial blood donors. So it was caused by blood contamination. So the outside world knew about it, but nobody took interest.

However, as I mentioned, till the late 1990s because of United States, interests have shifted. So the US embassy began to take interest in it. So that started this whole campaign about blaming and shaming Chinese government for not taking any measure against HIV/AIDS.

At the time, it was another development, which was because HIV/AIDS was becoming a political issue. And at the time, there was this kind of fear about how maybe China and India would become the next Africa, OK? So that became a major sort of security threat to the whole world. And also because of all the rising interest and also organizations, a lot of organizations, such as UNAID that was funded for not very long, they really needed a target.

They needed something to say that HIV/AIDS is very important, that China is not doing anything. There was this agenda. So they did exaggerate the scope of an impact of the blood contamination issue in China and all those things. So China provided a target. That was very much so and also because of SARS in 2003. That certainly also emphasized this kind of crisis around public health in China.

So that was when all kinds of interests began to emerge. Like Asia would– I mean, reasonably, you would think because of the huge population, obviously, if HIV/AIDS pandemic happened, that would be a disaster. So there was a lot of organizational and political sort of agenda going on behind those kind of interventions.

Barker: What were some of the changes that they wanted to see in China in terms of their public health and how they were approaching the HIV/AIDS epidemic?

Long: In terms of the particular kind of strategies, it was very typical blaming and shaming basically various international organizations, different Western governments. Also foreign, the media began to blast China, mostly the central government for not taking any measure or intervention in HIV/AIDS epidemic, very rightfully so.

So China had a long history in public health. It was part of the socialist legacy before 1970s. However, after since the 1980s, China pretty much just gave up on public health. It was compared to economic development. It was no longer something important. It had pretty much abandoned the public health and push it to the margin of its political and policy agenda.

So throughout the 1980s and 1990s, you would see the crumbling like really just whole collapse of public health institution in China. So HIV/AIDS was just one part of it in terms of infectious disease control. So they just pretty much denied, OK, we have AIDS epidemic.

It was very similar to what we observe during the early sort of outbreak of COVID-19, not just in China but also in many other countries is this denialism. OK, we do not have this pandemic. We don’t want to inform the people who were infected.

Many people in my research, they didn’t find out about their HIV positive status until like 10 years later. So there was no effort put into it. So that was a major sort of target in the early stage, which was pretty much amplified by the source crisis as the government did not want to invest in public health.

So at the beginning, the sort of foreign intervention was really to call for the government’s attention to public health but also provide technical and funding sort of support to help China. So there was definitely socialization but also like substantial help to assist China in this area.

Barker: And as you note in the book, this new mode of public health, so through foreign interventions, they had these targets, they were providing this assistance, this really clashed with how public health was traditionally dealt with in most states, including in China, where the government was the main actor. The government set the public health policies. That was how it was done. But this was very different. So can you explain what this clash was?

Long: OK, so public health when the concept was proposed back in the 18th century, the idea was public health was really part of the state responsibility. That was very the beginning was set up. So how disease surveillance and prevention usually is considered as something that help the state to exercise and expand its power over people and their bodies. It’s really exercise of control.

This is why you would see a lot of debates around, for example, mask mandates or, you know, quarantine, that type of thing, lockdown during the COVID. That was really the sort of freedom of the people versus control of the state. And then public health is also a domain to establish social contract between the state and its citizen.

So when the state really deliver public health goods, it’s supposed to be the foundation of citizen right claims. So, for example, one security officer in my research, he was saying, OK, if we allow all the foundations to come in or the foreigners who give money and deliver all the things to the local people, then they’re going to listen to them instead of our government, OK?

So it is supposed to be a breach of social contract between the government and the people. So, in many ways, what we are seeing here is that foreign intervention, the problem here is really at stake I would say it’s a sovereignty. It is a national security that type of concern. So that is fundamentally foreign interventions in that kind of area.

For example, I think a lot of political scientists have already commented about how that kind of project in Africa would really damage the sort of national government’s authority and their capacity and so on. But then in the case of public health, there is also the content of what the Western world consider as public health intervention versus the Chinese tradition. So those type of clashes also exist.

So in China, it certainly has its own socialist sort of tradition. But as I mentioned, in the 1980s and 1990s, public health was very much marginalized. So, at the time, they created what I call the socialist contagious model, which pretty much relegate infectious disease to defending socialist moral boundaries.

So it was supposed to be a morality problem rather than welfare and a life problem. So health department would just improvise emergency measures for such a kind of defense rather than developing systematic expertise and technical knowledge of public health responses.

So one of the things about public health measures in China at the time was it was very much antiprofessionalism. So it was very much grassroots, mass mobilization, and so on. But then here comes the Western model. The Western model would emphasize decentralization. So government or nation state does not have the ultimate authority.

It also emphasizes equal partnership between the state and nonstate actors. Mostly it’s nonprofits or civil society groups. It also emphasizes the delivery of technical intervention. So quantitative measures or performance became really critical.

And a major difference is that you can see that not just in China but also in a lot of Latin America or African countries is that public health interventions are delivered in a set of projects. There’s a lot of campaigns. So it’s no longer just a coherent sort of system of, you know, public health defense.

It was rather very fragmented of projects. It’s very a patchwork of project that supposedly to achieve very specific short-term goals and emphasize the sort of return on your investment in terms of the financial investment poured into the project. So that certainly created a lot of clashes, I think, in terms of just the sovereignty but also in terms of the content of public health interventions.

Barker: Yeah, you know, I think this is the great puzzle in your book, which is, you know, there are other states like Russia that really resisted this type of intervention from foreign actors and to their public health, particularly with HIV/AIDS.

But in China, it has a lot of capacity. The government is a strong government. So the puzzle that I think you put forth is why didn’t China resist this foreign pressure? Why didn’t you see China sort of going the path that Russia took? Why did we end up seeing these profound changes in public health administration as a result of these HIV/AIDS interventions in China?

Long: OK, that’s a great question. One thing I want to emphasize is that it was not a calculated decision made at the very beginning. People tend to think that Chinese government is so smart, you know, sophisticated. And that’s no, it was not decided at the very beginning.

So there are several things I would emphasize why China didn’t resist. First of all, obviously, there was, again, going back to SARS in 2003. So China definitely faced much more international pressure compared to any other authoritarian regimes. That’s one thing.

But then you would also say, OK, why not just window dressing, OK? Many people will say, yeah, you take some temporary measures afterwards, then you go back to your normal way. So what’s so different about China? There are two factors I highlight in my book. One is that transnational organizations were very successful in cultivating social movements.

So it put a lot of funding and training into Chinese AIDS activism at the time. And then it also worked a lot in terms of removing the stigma around HIV/AIDS, which was very effective in terms of mobilizing people infected with HIV/AIDS.

As I mentioned, there was a time period, it wasn’t just the Chinese government didn’t want to respond to AIDS, but also people who were infected didn’t want to acknowledge that fact neither. So there was a silence on both end. But international interventions really helped to say, no, you guys should rise up. You’re facing all these problems. You should assert your rights, your claim.

So foreign sort of foreign intervention provided a lot of the ammunitions. It provides this impetus, I think, to sustain the kind of pressure on the Chinese government. I think that’s one thing that didn’t happen in many other countries. Then the second thing is that people tend to think that, yes, Chinese government is wealthy, but it’s not everybody, especially not the specific bureaucrats.

So another thing we need to look at is public health officials pursuit of professional identity. It was a driving force in embracing foreign interventions. When we think about state reaction to external pressure, we tend to think of it as coherent, OK? Iran would have a certain reaction. North Korea has a certain reaction.

But in reality, when you look at beneath the regime, then you will see different departments, different organizational agency, they have very different pursuit, their goals, their resources, and so on. So even though the Communist Party in China had this elevated actually vigilance against the foreign influence since 2000, especially because of the Orange Revolution in Europe, so it was very unhappy about foreign intervention.

However, guess what? Public Health Department in China really welcomed the material resources, the legitimacy, and most importantly, the technical knowledge and professional training. People probably do not know that US CDC– so the China CDC was not funded until 2002. And it was modeled after the US model.

Chinese public health professionals really worshiped the US model for a very long time, say, at least a decade until 2013. So public health marginal position within the bureaucratic system in China made those officials particularly interested in the kind of material rewards as well as symbolic capital attached being accepted into this global health professional community.

So they were really the driving force in terms of welcoming and embracing all kinds of foreign money and models and all those things. But one thing that has shifted since the 2013 was that government became– the Chinese party began to realize that China was actually really good in public health intervention.

It became an area that associated with international power and prestige. So mind you, at the beginning, it was United States who was telling China, oh, HIV/AIDS was important. But then after 2013, it was Chinese government was like, oh, yes, HIV is important.

So it has become part of its political identity, which you can see very clearly during the COVID-19. It’s like, OK, we are this powerful. We are this responsible superpower. We are much better than the US because we can do a much better job in countering infectious disease.

So, at that point, infectious disease control or HIV/AIDS has already become part of the political status to prove China’s high standing in the world. It was also part of the Belt and Road development project that China began to export its own HIV prevention model into Africa and so on. So it has come to a full circle.

Barker: So, as you just very thoroughly discussed, China did engage with these international actors on HIV/AIDS quite deeply, right? But the results that these interventions were expected to bring, probably expected by these foreign actors like these Western governments, these Western organizations, they expected that these interventions might bring like a more liberal population, right?

But that didn’t exactly happen to the public health system in China. And you develop a term for this in your book, which is authoritarian absorption. So what is that? What is that term? What does it mean? And how did you see it play out here with the HIV/AIDS interventions?

Long: OK, so let me start with usually when we look at international interventions, we scholar tend to think it often fail because it happens a lot. So what happened in China, it’s more of a surprise to many people, including me. So here, the Democratic intervention was very critical from the very beginning.

So HIV/AIDS in China for a very long time was seen by many people as a sort of area where you can cultivate the Democratics or behavior, such as election, such as community, mobilization, and so on. However, those type of Democratic intervention techniques can be absorbed by the government agencies into the state apparatus for different purposes.

So by authoritarian absorption, I’m emphasizing two factors. One is that interveners shall train and cultivate social movements to carry the transnational materials symbolic and various practices into a domestic context. But then secondly, the government organizations could have the skills to channel the same movement in ways that basically repurpose those elements for authoritarian purpose.

Because I’m a Star Wars fan, so I actually think this is pretty much it. If you think about how Jedi actually gave Skywalker the training for him to become the Darth Vader, that’s pretty much how it describes the authoritarian sort of absorption in some ways. So I would still emphasize in many ways, international interventions mean to strengthen China’s public health in general.

That goal had failed in Africa in most countries, but it was very successful in China. So that I must emphasize, even though eventually then public health serves the political purpose of amplifying the authoritarian control. But I would still say it was– I would consider it as a success in many ways.

So, to some degree, this absorption was brought about by the Chinese government and by the health agencies, the local health agencies, right? But you also discuss in your book how it was enabled by the practices of these foreign interveners, right?

Barker: And you have sort of a great line, I think, about this, about the attitudes of these organizations. So you quote where you say, can we get the same results for less money? So this was this huge focus of these organizations that were giving resources, money into local health agencies in China, right? And so can you explain why or how these foreign actors sort of enabled this process?

Long: I really love this question because when people think about the expansion of authoritarian world, we tend to think of terms, such as authoritarian resistance. We tend to think it always comes from the authoritarian side. But the fact is that the game, especially when it comes to international development, the game was set up by the Westerners.

So I think there is a general trend, which is manifested, especially in public health, which is international organizations often rely on two sets of authority. One is what we call principled authority, which is political morals and values. That’s when we talk about freedom, democracy, human rights, and et cetera.

However, international organizations have decreasingly relied on those authority because they turn to another set of authority, which is expert authority based on specialized knowledge confined to managerial science and epidemiologic engineering. So that’s when the quantitative measures come into play.

That’s when the idea of the model of you must have good return on your financial investment that come into play. So even on the international aspects or on the international side, you always have this kind of tension between do we want to promote democracy versus how many interventions can we conduct to just given this amount of money?

Can we just achieve short-term goals as fast as we can? And I think this type of shift is especially beneficial to players, such as China. I think authoritarian governments are very good at playing the number game. If you want a number, if you want quantitative measures, they’re incredibly good at manufacturing good numbers. They have super sort of mobilization capacity.

So that kind of game plan would help authoritarian government to rise to the top because the game is set up for them. It is partially is Chinese government’s agencies are very good at adapting, but it is also– it also originate from the fact that the game is set up this way, so you cannot blame them for playing it.

Barker: Yeah, and I think as I was reading the book, some of the same effects of this push for quantification, push for results, I think you can see in a lot of different areas as well. So the area that I’m most familiar with is sort of democracy aid, right? So aid given to these civil society organizations. And you can see also the push to have results, privileges, some organizations over others.

And the ones that may be most effective at actually doing the things that the sort of donors want are the ones that may not have the same capacity to take advantage of quantifying or like, you know, really pushing for these measurable outcomes, right? So it’s super fascinating. And I think, you know, there’s a lot of soul searching that maybe these organizations might need to do.

So I think one of the impacts of this push for quantification and on social movements in China that you talk about are sort of urban gay men’s groups. So one of the primary beneficiaries of these interventions aimed at HIV/AIDS were these urban gay men’s groups. And this is also a puzzle that you put forth in your book.

So why would these urban gay men’s groups be the main beneficiaries, even though sort of male to male HIV transmission is actually quite low relative to other forms of transmission, as you note, and also given the long history of homophobia in the country? Why were they the actors that became more– I don’t want to say empowered but more like they were able to expand their activism?

Long: It was really very long-term sort of a historical process. When I first started my fieldwork in 2007, at that time, victims of blood contamination were certainly at the center of the movement, as you can imagine, because they were also the ones who attracted foreign interventions from the very get go. So their deaths, their suffering at the time were supposed to be the evidence of human rights violation in China, et cetera.

However, as you mentioned, because of the push for quantification, that began– activists in the urban areas– we’re talking about because of blood contamination that happened in the rural areas. And so we’re talking about the people who already had a lot of suffering. They were struggling with disease and all those things.

They were not very good at producing quantitative index or achieving the kind of performance compared to the HIV negative gay men activists in the urban areas. So in the urban areas, not only did gay men groups very effective at producing the quantitative results, they were also at a much more advantageous sort of position to collaborate with the government.

So I mentioned that China became really good at public health intervention largely also because of the assistance provided by gay men groups, OK? So they helped China to consistently sort of put forward higher and higher index and all those things and then which helped the Chinese government to secure more international projects to project this kind of very successful sort of image of public health intervention.

So that certainly helped them to gain favors in terms of providing this model of civil society and the government collaborative model, which they suppose they call it harmonious civil society intervention model as a way to counter against the Western sort of civil society model because the Western model is supposed to be the opposition between the civil society and the government.

But the gay men somehow helped the government to say, no, no, no, we can work together and in a very harmonious way. And this model was then further exported to Africa, OK? So it’s very different. That certainly helped the gay men organizations. But that also gave the government a leverage to repressing the rural activists without the political backlash because now you look at us, OK, we’re so liberal.

We’re supporting gay men organizations. We still have civil society here. I have a separate paper, published at American Journal of Sociology that talks specifically about how this kind of divide and conquer strategy really helped the authoritarian governments to shield their own actions from international attention and international pressure. So that worked out in a way. That was not intended or anticipated by anybody at the beginning.

Barker: Right, yeah. I think you open the book with a very illustrative case about these different trajectories of the two groups you’ve just talked about. One of the activists who you knew sort of at the beginning was a member of one of these urban gay men’s groups, and the other was this member or leader of a rural blood contamination group.

And so, as you note, they both sort of benefited from the space sort of brought by these interventions at the beginning, right? They ended up in quite different places. And I think this is helpful to illustrate what you just explained that on the one hand, you had these groups that were working in a harmonious way, and on the other hand, you had these groups that were sort of repressed and pushed to the side. So could you tell a little bit about these two activists and sort of their different– where they ended up and sort of their different end points?

Long: OK, maybe I should walk back a little bit and talk about gay men groups versus victims of blood contamination. So, as I mentioned earlier, China’s largest HIV/AIDS pandemic really took place because of blood contamination.

So gay men did not attract any attention from public health department for a very long time. In fact, homosexuality was– some researchers had to commit suicide because they were trying to do some research among this group with regard to HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. So for a very long time, it was very strong homophobia among public health officials.

So when I started doing research in 2007, so I met several groups of activists. One group was the victims of blood contamination. So that group has two components. One was like people, Gordon. He was a farmers who used to sell his blood in the 90– he started selling blood in 1994 and then ended in 1995.

And his whole village, probably about 70% of the male adults in his village were selling blood for money. So he got infected. He didn’t find out about his HIV positive status until the end of 1990s when people in his village started to die. So eventually, 30% of people who were infected actually either died of AIDS or other infections or committed suicide.

So there was a wave of just death in the village while the government pretty much denied the pandemic even existed. Another group of blood contamination victims were mostly women because they were using blood products or actually they were encouraged by doctors to use blood products mostly during reproductive surgeries.

So one woman I met, her name is May. So she got infected at the hospital in 1995. Then she infected her baby during breastfeeding. They never realized what’s wrong with the baby. She just went to hospital again and again like so many times until 2004 when the virus infected her brain. That was the girl’s nine years birthday. Just two months after that, she passed away.

So May found out she was HIV positive. Her daughter was positive and then died. That was when they found out. At the time, she already had her second daughter, who was also infected during all those time. So those are the main components of that victim group. Then you have gay men activists. Most gay men activists at the time were HIV negative.

They were using HIV/AIDS mostly as a way to come out and do activism because it was super dangerous. And they didn’t have the space to really just press their claims about their rights simply around homosexuality. But at the time, they were super marginalized. However, as I track those two groups in the following 11 years– I cannot believe it was 11 years– then you would see the divergence.

They used to work together between 2007 and 2009, but then you would see more and more fights and conflict between both groups, especially as the gay men groups became endorsed not only by the Chinese government but also by foundations, Western media and also. By 2002– 2000– no, 2012 and 2013, you would see the gay men had already become the face of AIDS activism. They were publicly endorsed and met by the Chinese government.

And they became this, you know, part of this model of harmonious civil society collaboration versus [INAUDIBLE] and may became just– their activism became– they didn’t have enough support from other parties. And so their movement began to die and pretty much ceased to exist in 2015. But gay men groups are still very active up to this day. So those are the sort of divergence in terms of their different path.

Barker: One of the points that you make in your book and that I kind of wanted to maybe draw out a little bit here is that, you know, social movements or sort of supporting civil society, it’s not just a whole, you know, like a wholesale good, right?

There are the ways that you can see the inequality kind of be reproduced. At least you know you have these urban groups where people are maybe more of the middle class. You know, even if they are, you know, there’s a lot of homophobia in the country, they still are able to sort of– they’re maybe educated, they’re middle class.

They may be able to take advantage of these opportunities in a different way than people who are more rural, maybe less educated, you know, women, whatever, all these different inequalities that you saw kind of part in your research. And so I wanted to draw that out a little bit. And I think you refer to this as the dark side of collective action, right? So just something I think was really fascinating.

Long: Thank you.

Barker: And I mean, just to sort of, you know, maybe conclude on this particular section, I mean, did you see, as you were following these gay men’s groups, any sort of, I don’t know, like what they thought about the fact that they became the face of the movement and these other people who were, you know, also suffering from HIV/AIDS that they sort of fell away? I mean, did they think about it at all or was it just sort of like we have to make do with what we have?

Long: I think a coalition is always difficult for social movements around the world. It doesn’t matter what you do. It takes effort to build. And there was a time, as I mentioned, pretty much in the early 2000, even mid-2000, that there were a lot of funding, Western funding to help to cultivate that kind of coalition and solidarity.

Again, I don’t think this was sort of intended. It was not planned out as one activist, you know, activist group wanted to push another one to the side. It was really a process. One thing I want to emphasize is that both groups from the very beginning, there was a division in terms of their relationship with the government and how they approached different activism exactly because they were using different sources of Western funding.

So, for example, the Western NGOs tend to collaborate much more closely with the victims of contaminated blood, OK? The US government were much more involved with that group compared to the gay activists. The gay activists mostly were working through the public health route in terms of participating in projects.

They worked also much closely with the UN entity. So I think that from the very beginning had created a lot of division. But then because of the quantification trend, quantification trend make many activists to believe that it’s not– like how do you showcase your success, your performance?

They also accepted this kind of idea of if I can push out more quantitative results, I’m just better. I perform very well. They accepted this type of language and discourse, which makes them think, OK, since I can produce more result, that must mean I’m much better than those patterns.

And there must be something wrong with them when they cannot just show the return on the financial investment. So naturally, it creates this kind of hierarchy and which masks a lot of the factors you mentioned, such as class, such as the sort of space, especially in terms of the interaction between different groups.

Like who have the advantage to interact with Western organizations, for example? Must be the urban one. The rural ones, it takes forever to even go to the city. But when you think your success is only built on your own performance, you only think other people’s failure is due to their poor performance. You don’t think of it as something else.

And also, one of the beauty of longitudinal ethnography, which I conducted is that at the time, you really don’t know. You really do not realize a lot of the consequences often show up and appear several years later. Some of the fight or some of the struggle, you just didn’t know. At the time, you were very much concerned with different fights among activists.

You didn’t realize, oh, there is corruption going on. There was the state intervention going on. You did not realize that until several years later. But by that time, the coalition was already damaged. So I don’t think it was intentional. It was– no.

Barker: So I think to shift gears a bit to the takeaways from your book, and I think, you know, what we just discussed, right, which is that, you know, it wasn’t intentional but sort of like the over time sort of impacts of all these different actors. And I think one important contribution of your book is sort of offering a much more nuanced view of these transnational interventions, right? It’s not just a static one-off thing that happens, right?

There’s these downstream effects that you might not have even seen happening or intended to happen or even could have foreseen at all several years later. So I think, you know, thinking about what your book has to offer for this type of research, I mean, where would you like or where do you see the field of research on transnational interventions going in the– like, where would you like it to go? What issues do you think are important to keep in mind for scholars who are interested in this type of work?

Long: I think this is probably a very dark time for us because we’re not talking about global engagement. We’re talking about disengagement. So I would say first of all, this might sound– I think many of my colleagues might not agree with me. But first of all, I do think foreign interventions need to keep going.

I think China is actually– despite of my focus on the side effects, one of the major takeaway is that the intervention was pretty successful. Just imagine without all the infrastructure capacity that HIV/AIDS intervention had put in place, what could have happened during COVID-19?

I mean, it could have just run through 1.4 billion population. That would be a huge disaster to the world. So in that kind of light, nowadays, actually, China is becoming very much excluded from the public health discussion in the United States. I think the disengagement is very disheartening.

So from that angle, I would say just transnational advocacy is great, even though it has problems. But secondly, I do think we need to pay more attention to the organizational sort of dynamics on the ground as the research moves forward.

I think in the past, we paid a lot of attention to the political ideology aspects, the politics, economic aspects, but we haven’t paid enough attention to the fact that all the actors on the ground, their organizations, they have their limitations. They have their resources. They have their goals.

So you need to think about those type of factors and then think about, OK, does it make sense? So, for example, nowadays, if you look at UNAIDS, 20 years ago, there was a bigger critique of China. But nowadays, they’re just praising China left and right. And you got to understand, it’s not just politically motivated. There are many reasons behind that. So how to understand that is very important.

But then thirdly, I think this is also an exciting time, I guess, for transnational advocacy study because in the past, we were very used to how the Western world was providing the help to the poor activists in the Global South.

Nowadays, as you can see, you have Brazil. You have India. You have China, who are very invested in the new term, which is like development diplomacy. So there are new actors on the horizon. And how are they going to affect the landscape, affect the future? I think that would be really exciting to see.

But of course, I’m also worried because in the past, it was much easier to just criticize, you know, the Western imperialism. You can criticize the liberal hypocrisy. Nowadays, you have different actors who are authoritarian on the horizon. So what’s going to happen next? I think it would be a much more complicated thing down the road.

Barker: Yeah, and I think we can conclude, I think, with the question that you just briefly even touched on in your response there, which is what would have happened had this infrastructure not been put in place to help with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in COVID-19?

So, you know, let’s talk about the COVID-19 of it all, right? So how can we use what we’ve just discussed and what your book has sort of, you know, the conclusions of your book, how can that help us understand how China sort of approached and how China fared during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is sort of the question still on everyone’s minds?

Long: Yeah, I mean, I think COVID-19 has posted a lot of challenges to me because I had to really think very hard and deep about, OK, the conclusions argument I put forward in the book and whether it still stands. I would say actually, when you look at COVID-19, you can see a lot of the technique that China had learned through HIV/AIDS programs were certainly had been working really well.

One of the major factor, for example, like Dr. Zunyou, who was the Director of National Center for AIDS, STD Control and Prevention I think from 2005 to 2017, I’m not so sure about ending point, then he became the chief epidemiologist of China’s CDC. And then he became the Chinese version of Anthony Fauci during COVID.

OK, so that gives you some sense about how important HIV/AIDS intervention, the whole program, how does that helped COVID-19 intervention. People sometimes complain about– even at the very beginning of the pandemic when China was performing really terribly, it was so many mistakes. And people were complaining. I totally understand that.

But again, we’re talking about China [INAUDIBLE] did not even exist until 2002. During my research, it was even until 2007, a lot of public health officials did not even have a basic sense of project management, accounting, like really basic managerial practices, OK?

So we’re talking about a bureaucracy that had been learning actually rather fast during this whole time, actually less than two decades. So from that aspect, I would say China had come really a long way. But then there was also the element of, for example, community mobilization that was a big component of HIV/AIDS intervention that was also imported into China, OK?

Then that during COVID-19, you would see the traditional socialist mass mobilization model had been replaced by community mobilization. So that’s why you would see a lot of emphasis on the volunteers, community organizations who were playing critical role in surveillance, basically. So that part is also, I would say, one of the kind of heritage from the HIV/AIDS era.

But overall, I would say COVID was a time that you would see China has really come a long way in terms of building up its bureaucratic infrastructure, building up its professional sort of force in terms of dealing with infectious disease. From that aspect, I would say foreign intervention had done an incredible job. And of course, China has also performed really well because the similar process didn’t have the same result in many other countries, yeah.

Barker: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was, I think, a tremendous discussion about, I think, a really important topic. And, you know, I speak for myself, but I’m very glad we have people like you working on these important questions. So thanks again. And yeah, that’s it for today.

Long: Thank you.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

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