Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

A version of this is published in the current issue of the LSCS Advocate . Part 2 is here. Our Undocumented Students and the Union’s Responsibilities Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account. (Jacques Rancière) On 5 September 2017, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III announced that DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) will be rescinded in six months. We’re going to address this issue to clarify what DACA is (and what it isn’t), why this should matter to us as members of a labor union, and what we can do. In his announcement , Sessions repeated multiple specious claims and “alternative facts” about DACA, migrants, jobs, and public safety: Sessions repeatedly uses the terminology “illegal aliens,” which, although we may hear it frequently, is not a legal term in the Immigration and Nationality Act, and it conflates the act of crossing the border illegally with an ongoing le...

A quick review. Others such as Dr Chris Bateman do Arendt more justice. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men…corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. ( The Human Condition  7) Action : HA here defines action as the interaction between people "without the intermediary of things or matter" (7), which has some semblance to Habermas' public sphere and the ideal speech situation and inevitably comes with plurality. The principle of action is it requires freedom , in a political and economic sense, and produces political power. Consider what this means to us in our communities. Labor (human as Animal Laborans ) is what we do to survive; it never ends. It's the ...

23 December 2014. A cold front came through Houston this morning, dropping the temperatures to what Houstonians consider "chilly." I'm balancing my free time with writing, reading, napping, exercising, cleaning and recycling, and anything other than what might be considered "work." Going through my files, I found this reflection from my day-long volunteer work in a warmer July 2012 with Zach Moser and Eric Leshinsky of the Shrimp Boat Project , doing more harm than good with their efforts to harvest shrimp in Galveston Bay. They asked me to write a reflection, included here. What I didn't mention is that I lost a very important piece of wood that day, used to separate live shrimp from the other haul. Imagine someone working so fast that in his haste to throw some crab away, he throws the separating board instead. Yeah, I didn't mention that. My purpose that warm July was twofold: to get some experience working manual labor and to understand more abou...