1 Introduction
The group stood in a circle in the middle of a busy traffic square in the central plaza of Guatemala City. Cars wove around us. Toward the centre of the plaza was a white pop-up tent, under which lay a circle of carefully placed woven art plaques made of wood wrapped with yarn. They had names on them, and at closer look, resembled little headstones, or maybe children’s art. There were white candles burning in a circle, and a simple engraved plaque to the side.
The plaque was cemented into the ground with the following declaration etched in gold writing on a black background:
Justicia para las niñas de Guatemala. En memoria de las 41 niñas asesinadas en el Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción renombramos a este espacio como
Plaza de las niñas de Guatemala
8 de Marzo
No las olvidamos
Fue el Estado
‘Justice for the girls of Guatemala. In memory of the 41 murdered girls, the Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción. We rename this space as the Plaza of the Girls of Guatemala. 8 of March. We don’t forget them. It was the State.’
I was there as part of a delegation for a joint initiative with Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI), JASS-Just Associates and the Foundation of Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum).Footnote 1 The trip brought together Nobel Peace Laureates, regional human rights organisations and Indigenous women defenders of land, territory and water, to learn from activist wisdom. The delegation met with women working on the front lines on a range of issues, from protecting water rights and democracy, to seeking justice for victims of gender-based violence and to bearing witness to Guatemala’s historic genocide trial. I joined as a representative of a university institute whose mission is to re-imagine policy-making from the perspective of social movements.Footnote 2
This particular stop by the delegation was to hear from protesters standing witness and maintaining a memorial for forty-one girls killed in a fire in a state-run group home, Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, on the outskirts of Guatemala City in March 2017. The girls were in the care of the state when they died. Most were Indigenous and poor. On the days before their deaths, a group of these girls had been seen throwing rocks at the school, protesting multiple forms of abuse within the home by the school’s teachers and monitors. Two days before the fire, more than fifty of these young people tried to escape and run away. Very few were successful – the rest were found and returned. As punishment for trying to escape, fifty-six girls were locked in a classroom. The next day, a fire engulfed that classroom, the place in which they were locked. State officials and police officers stood guard outside the locked building while they burned alive (Vicente Reference Vicente2016; OACNUDH 2018).
This article turns to the altar of the Guatemalan girls, the ongoing public protest in the plaza seven years after their deaths, and suggests that listening to these girls and those who protest in their memory offers an important intervention for challenging the limits of law and policy.Footnote 3 I argue that their daily acts of protest are not just a memorialisation of a horrific event. Rather, their protest and calls for accountability present an analysis of institutional and state violence. Such analysis widens the lens for legal and policy claim-making of the state.Footnote 4 Indeed, these activists are making claims about what policy ought to do. And in making such claims, they reveal their deep expertise and knowledge about how actions and inactions of the state cause violence, as well as how a much wider range of voices is needed in the formulation of policy.
Whose voices should be turned to as legal, political and economic experts about the state and in policy-making are not as settled as often presented. Much of the elite policy world and policy interest groups have a vested interest in presenting policy as located largely within law and legal structures, bureaucracies and institutions. But policy claim-making is not just done in this one realm (Luttrell-Rowland et al. Reference Luttrell-Rowland, Engebretson and Segalo2021; Levitsky Reference Levitsky2014; Okech Reference Okech2020; Chua Reference Chua2018; Assis and Erdman Reference Assis Prandini2021). As the altar for the girls of Guatemala reminds us, policy claim-making also happens through protest, direct action, coalitions and absence. Policy, in this version, is both about the world we yearn to create and that which is lacking. Those closest to and living the violence are the ones who most clearly see the solutions (Field and Simmons Reference Field and Simmons2022; Hill Collins Reference Hill Collins2019; Roberts Reference Roberts2022). Critical theorist and geographer Ruth Gilmore writes that ‘Policy is to politics, what method is to research. It’s a script for enlivening some future possibility – an experiment’ (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2022, p. 50). To hear such a perspective, however, requires recognising the limits of many dominant institutional lenses and the ways such frames often hinder who is turned to as experts and knowledge holders about policy. Further, and importantly, the ways we listen and respond to this wider circle of policy experts are significant, particularly given the historical, material and everyday lived ways such knowledge holders are not only not turned to as experts, but often actively dismissed (Field and Simmons Reference Field and Simmons2022).Footnote 5
Activist-scholarship, as this special issue attests, has a tradition of grappling with such questions of who gets to be taken seriously, as well as of introspection on the need for expanded frames about both expertise and methods. I write this article from the perspective of an activist-scholar and also an administrator, working within a public law school located in the Global North. Further, I write located within a University Institute, whose mission focuses on the intersection of policy and academia. The aspiration of this Institute is to re-imagine policy from the perspective of social movements and to serve as a hub for cross-sectoral, cross-movement and transnational organising, research and scholarship. Core to such a mission is a reinterpretation of what counts as social and legal policy – the domains in which policy operates and circulates – and, importantly, a robust and healthy questioning of what it means, or could mean, to ethically ‘bring in’ the perspectives of social movements.
Drawing on two distinct moments – from standing witness to protest in Guatemala to unpacking programme design in New York City – this paper explores methodological questions and learnings offered by those on the front lines, those not necessarily deemed policy-makers or policy experts, yet whose knowledge disrupts how such issues are often even thought about. If a category of activist-scholar administrator were able to exist, one of the first tasks at hand would surely be to contend with the means and methods not just to listen to activists, organisers and community experts but, importantly, to centre and heed such perspectives. Listening, in and of itself, often does not go far enough to create meaningful change.
Doing such work and being open to such claims requires imagining institutions – and, in this case, the university – as a place of the possible. In these times of the rise and presence of authoritarianism, the shrinking of academic freedom and free speech rights and the retraction from human rights and dignity, such a stance seems optimistic at best. It feels we are quite far from the question of what it would look like if universities adopted core and shared principles of valuing a range of knowledges, questioning ways they themselves are not exempt from violence but perhaps complicit in it, and seeking to self-reflect and be open to adapt as needed for redress. We are even further from seeing such perpetual work as deeply and fundamentally tied to, not separate from, the core purposes of universities.
Perhaps the task at hand for this moment instead is to lift up the knowledge and wisdom of those on the front lines who are most often targeted for violence and discrimination on the basis of identity and push for the incorporation of their knowledge into a wide number of structures of power. To be able to turn to and hear such knowledge takes a particular orientation or sensibility and can be done through a range of methods.Footnote 6 This paper explores what I call ‘relational listening’ as one key method to do so and notes three practical lessons I’ve grappled with while working as an administrator who is responsible for both developing and implementing policy, particularly in terms of the need for (1) bureaucratic imagination, (2) an iterative orientation and (3) analytical expansion. These lessons stem from listening and learning from the work of grassroots organisers. Through conversations and moments – sometimes fleeting, sometimes sustained over time – such exchanges have challenged me and made me think anew about the multiple sites and sources of violence and the related responsibility that administrative work demands to hold oneself accountable within institutions that can so easily get lost in the daily work of implementation. What is clear is that much more thinking and action are needed to more expansively manoeuvre within and across bureaucratic systems, whether in private institutions such as universities or public institutions of the state, to adequately hear such feedback and meaningfully respond to calls for change.
2 A shelter to flee
In the years since the 8 March 2017 fire, Plaza de las niñas in the centre of Guatemala City, continues to serve as a space of public remembrance – an ‘altar de las niñas’, an active honouring of the memory of the girls. But it is also a place of public demand: that the forty-one deaths of these girls not be remembered as solely about individual violence but rather as state-sanctioned institutional violence. While there are many types of public institutions run by states (universities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, prisons), in this case Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción was a state-run group home. The deaths of these girls made national and international news because of the circumstances: before the 8 March fire, there had been years of reports of ongoing abuse within this home. Shortly before the fire, the girls had finally got the attention of the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman. Indeed, before they died, the attorney general’s office and the social welfare secretariat toured the state shelter and decided to move the girls to this smaller home while they investigated and decided whether the allegations were true. Even so, instead of a state intervention before their deaths, a total of fifty-six girls were padlocked in the classroom when the fire began.
The public altar stands today in the centre of Guatemala City, and mothers, family members and women’s organisations remain diligently alert in their call for justice.Footnote 7 The public naming of the girls in the square, the group’s saying of their names and the holding of their existence, aim to ensure that the lessons of the story do not vanish. In the circle, the organisers note, with fierceness:
No fue fuego.
Fue el Estado.
No fue fuego.
Fue el Estado.
It wasn’t the fire.
It was the state.
It wasn’t the fire.
It was the state.
These words, chanted by the organisers of the protest, are a vivid naming of responsibility and a clear seeing of how the state is responsible for these deaths through neglect and the grim conditions that led to their deaths. The organisers, when describing the ongoing public call and everyday altar in the square, denounce what happened to the girls as ‘institutional feminicide’ – the killing of girls at the hands of state institutions. In the seven years since, these organisers are still demanding justice, waiting for responses to their letters, pleas and calls that justice be served. Partly, their asks are practical: there were fifteen girls who had not died in the fire that day in March, but who had still been gruesomely burned. The group asks that their medical and psychological bills be paid, and that attention be given by policy-makers, legislators, congressmen, international organisations. That these girls who are alive today, left with serious burns and haunted forever by that night, should not be overlooked by the same violent system that allowed the violence to ensue.
Their argument is that it is a shortcoming to see violence as only about physical or immediate acts rather than how states set up both the conditions and sometimes the active disinvestment that allows such violence to take place. Such an argument has been an important premise made by critical race theorists, feminists and practitioners (Fregoso and Bejarano Reference Fregoso and Bejarano2010; Hernández Reference Hernández2016; Abu-Lughod et al.; Gilmore Reference Gilmore2008). Multiple scholars and organisers have long argued that the failure of the state to guarantee a life free from violence is itself a human rights violation.Footnote 8 In this case, the community comprising the Guatemala protest posits that it would be short-sighted and incomplete to look only at the individual perpetrators (e.g. the state workers who refused to open the padlocked door during the fire) and the girl victims. Instead, they shine a light on the larger role of the state: that the active and cumulative neglect by the state – from the lack of funding for the shelter, to the refusal to respond to the cries for help to address the circumstances that led to the girls being padlocked away in the first place, as well as the years of not assisting the girls who survived – are acts of violence and institutional femicide, the killing of girls at the hands of state institutions.
Standing at the square that day in May, it was easy to feel disconnected, distant and overwhelmed. It would be easy to interpret the organisers’ claims as a story of grievance about individuals wronged and victimised by state government officials. But to really hear the framing these organisers are putting forward as that of institutional feminicide disrupts such a simplistic understanding. Instead, by focusing on the role of institutions, the lessons to be learned and the reconciliation that is desired, the question and focus broaden beyond the immediate, the local or even the individual.Footnote 9
This case, and the girls and women in the Plaza de las niñas in Guatemala, widen the aperture of how we can understand violence, legality and policy. Legal scholar Sandra Levitsky writes that much of ‘law’s emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew” – to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange’ (Reference Levitsky2018, p. 258). The women in the Plaza de las niñas, through their daily protests are doing just this. In their framing and naming of institutional femicide, these women are connecting the ways everyday institutional decisions are, or can be, a form of violence. Their public refrain ‘it wasn’t the fire, it was the state’ serves both as a wider call for accountability and a fundamental expansion of what even counts as violence. In doing so, they are showing deep expertise about legal and political subjecthood, and they are also making a new construction – a rupture and a call for things to be different. In taking seriously such claims, indeed, even to be able to recognise their knowledge and hear their critiques as policy claims, would demand that institutions turn to a much wider set of actors. Further, and perhaps more unsettling, is how it would require seeing institutional sites of power (be it a university, a government entity, a non-profit) as something not distinct or distant from everyday sites of inequity.
3 (Relational) Listening as method
In my previous work, based on a decade of research with working young people in Lima, Peru, I described a methodological approach I call ‘relational listening’ in order to better see and understand everyday state violence (Luttrell-Rowland Reference Luttrell-Rowland2023). In this approach, I join the chorus of scholars, activists and critical thinkers who note that those closest to sites and systems of violence should be respected as thinkers and knowers, and that a wider analytical toolbox is needed to hear and recognise such insights (e.g. Field and Simmons Reference Field and Simmons2022; Hill Collins Reference Hill Collins2019; Roberts Reference Roberts2022; Auyero and Swistun Reference Auyero and Alejandra Swistun2009; Mama and Okazawa-Rey Reference Mama and Okazawa-Rey2012). I describe relational listening as an orientation that seeks to understand both research subjects and those doing research as situated in time and space, reflexive about positionality and attentive to the ways that power and history necessarily shape all interactions, including research. It suggests that much of the ways people are trained to listen and orient toward each other is through a particular individual lens, one that champions and privileges certain forms of knowledge over others.Footnote 10 Relational listening is therefore not just interested in the content of what people say but also the relational and historical context in which they say it, what is not able to be said or spoken, and the structural and political dynamics at play through power relations.
Such a premise challenges a largely institutional orientation that remains dominant in most disciplines. Much research and listening are taught to orient with a spatial scheme that distances the researcher from the subjects and that makes invisible institutional interests. This is so true that sometimes it is easy to overlook how deep institutionalisation as a priority runs – especially because many of us rely on such structures and systems on a daily and even moment-to-moment way. This is perhaps particularly true in spaces such as the academy, where there are incentives and pressures to understand knowledge in a spatial scheme organised around hierarchy rather than, first and foremost, around accountability. Such a scheme, for example, would see those listening or working with activists or organisers mainly as a practice of advocating or speaking on behalf of others. While there can be rewards (whether prestige, monetary or institutional) to amplify or translate the ideas of movements, such an orientation is not automatically activist-scholarship and may, in some cases, even reproduce the very systems of extraction and violence that activists critique (Canfield Reference Canfield2022; Roberts Reference Roberts2022).Footnote 11 A relational model instead ‘turns toward the complex and intricate ways people are implicated in each other’s lives, how knowledge is often co-constituted, and is attentive to the everyday impacts of long histories of colonization, global violence, and systems of domination’ (Luttrell-Rowland Reference Luttrell-Rowland2023, p. 9). This distinction is important, given that systems of domination and violence do not live solely outside of the institutions or spaces being studied but are infused inside them as well. Indeed, the very spatial scheme of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, or close or far, often does not work for many cases of institutional or state violence where injury is not only located in the present or immediate but also based on long legacies and global systems of interlocking violence. Questioning oneself as part of such systems and one’s own role in them – be it researcher or administrator or collaborator – is therefore critical to a frame of relational listening.
Such an approach differs from those that prioritise neutrality or that frame the practice of listening as neutral – as much of the policy and administration world does (Clements Reference Clements2024). Distance and rationality are prized in the policy world and are deemed necessary elements of an effectively functioning bureaucracy (Wiebe Reference Wiebe2016). Stefano Harney and Fred Moten make this point vividly in their analysis of how often policy is positioned as inherently there to correct. ‘Policy will help with the plan, and even more, policy will correct the planners. Policy will discover what is not yet theorized, what is not yet fully contingent, and most importantly what is not yet legible. Policy is correction… This is the first rule of policy. It fixes others’ (Harney and Moten Reference Harney and Moten2013, p. 78). For Harney and Moten, one of the most dangerous elements of dominant policy is the instrumentality of seemingly being able to be neutral, and the ways that institutions (particularly the state) are thus seen as outside, or far from, systems of power.
The organisers of the Plaza de las niñas name an important part of institutional femicide as this spatial scheme that sets up violence as either far or close. That is, in their widening of what constitutes violence beyond just physical, they also shed light on the dangers of seeing policy as only about action. One of the main frustrations of the organisers of the Plaza de las niñas protest has been the silence and inaction of the state. After years of unanswered letters, visits, emails and requests, they describe a visceral waiting for justice. Such delay of response has often been described as a common feature of bureaucracy, and the ways that waiting is built in and even seen as necessary to the process of state systems (Auyero Reference Auyero2012; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2021). In this case, the organisers of the Plaza de las niñas describe the years of waiting as an additional injury to those protesting, a reminder that the pitch of their claims is neither attended to nor heard, in part because their protest is not seen as a form of policy expertise or knowledge by the state. Such erasure, because of their positionality, is not always highlighted enough. Yet in the waiting is both silence and what Rob Nixon names as a ‘slow violence’ of neglect and withholding (Nixon Reference Nixon2013). Nixon describes that one of the very features of what he calls ‘slow violence’ is that so much of it ‘remain[s] largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated’ (2013, p. 6) particularly as it plays out in the bodies and lives of poor and marginalised people. The waiting and silence that occur in the name of bureaucratic structures can be seen as part of this, as described by the women from Guatemala.
A key methodological challenge, therefore, is to expand whose knowledge counts, with ‘action’ not being the only focus. In their daily acts of protest, these women’s claims are forms of legal and policy knowledge about the state and its institutions. Further, they are calls for what other priorities ought to be, given the injustices they name. Their claims are indictments and a clear seeing of accountability and violence. Part of the way institutional violence works, besides the absence of justice or action, is through the active refusal to listen or respond (Menjívar Reference Menjívar2011; Okech and Essof Reference Okech and Essof2023; Auyero Reference Auyero2012; Taylor Reference Taylor2016; Han Reference Han2012; Heathcote and Kula Reference Heathcote and Kula2023; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2021). It is also in the erasure of which subjects get to be recognised, and which claims get to be heard in the first place (Ferreira da Silva Reference Ferreira da Silva2009; Pahuja Reference Pahuja2011).
For those working within the realm of social and legal studies, and particularly within institutions that are interested in the inclusion of a wide range of actors, such erasure and questions of ethical and purposeful methods become important. Ruth Gilmore writes about the concept of ‘organized abandonment’ as a critical feature of the ways contemporary systems of racial capitalism and neoliberalism work. Rather than categorising poor places as marginalised, or forgotten or even abandoned, with the insertion of ‘organized’, Gilmore draws attention to the role of states, as well as institutional systems of capital and labour. ‘Abandoned places are also planned concentrations or sinks – of hazardous materials and destructive practices that are in turn sources of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’ (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2008, p. 36). Gilmore’s argument draws attention to the many consequences of waiting and silence; the use of ‘organized’ reminds us that these are choices by institutions, by systems and by individuals.
In the case of Guatemala, organised abandonment is arguably not only the failure of the state leading up to the girls’ deaths. It is also the lack of recognition of these Indigenous girls’ lives in the first place, and their calls for justice as policy claims and knowledge. The death of these girls (from the fire), and the daily and seemingly small but structural decisions that led up to their deaths, including but not limited to the lack of funding, the lack of follow through and the global inequity that put them there in the first place are all part of why the women protestors call this case institutional femicide. By calling out the state’s lack of recognition and action, these women assert the multiple forms of interlocking violence: material, structural and institutional. An increased range of methods is therefore needed, perhaps particularly so for well-meaning administrators, to resist the lure of seeing bureaucratic work as largely neutral or not about choices large and small. And to question what it would mean to listen and act on a much wider range of knowledges (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2021).Footnote 12
4 It’s not personal, it’s the work
Creating structures and iterative processes to listen and integrate the voices of those on the front lines of violence is important symbolically and institutionally. Some years before the circle at the Plaza, I was working at a university entity that was holding a workshop for grassroots movement leaders. I was one of the organisers of the event, and we were beginning a programme where one of the main contributions we sought to offer was that of the university as a convening space across movements. In this workshop, we brought together different activists and organisers in New York, all of whom were working on questions of violence – be it personal and domestic, or state and structural. We thought having the group share strategies and ideas would be generative – a chance for them to exchange resources.
Instead, the first meeting of what was supposed to be a six-month engagement process between the group felt off: many of the participants seemed hesitant and unforthcoming. Some people came late, some rolled their eyes or seemed distracted and tied to their phones. Others stayed quiet and didn’t share. I was trying not to be exasperated by the response; wasn’t this an opportunity the university was providing, and couldn’t we more easily find a way toward connection?
I approached one particularly hesitant member during a break. Was the content too much? Too demanding? The time commitment too large? What was bothering her? She seemingly laughed at me and said she was disappointed because it felt like such a waste of opportunity. These were her colleagues, her comrades, her competition for funding. Why take time out of their busy days serving front-line victims of violence to be in an ivory tower so that the university could get guidance on how to act? Was this all self-congratulatory? Or worse yet, was it actually an exercise to take money and resources from grassroots organisations? To capture or extract their knowledge, strategies, lessons from the trade? I was stunned and quiet – I felt put in my place. How could such good intentions, such honourable intent, be so misread?
I went to the facilitators of the workshop to pull them aside and share what had been said to me. Certain they would be as mortified as I was, in that moment I sought validation that we were, indeed, doing good work. Instead, the facilitator looked at me sternly and said, ‘This isn’t personal. This is the work.’
What she meant that day was that getting sidetracked to take such feedback as a personal attack on me, our programme or even the intent would not actually help us to hear the feedback. This participant was voicing honest questions about the limits and possibilities of the university as a space for those working with front-line survivors of violence. Who are partners worthy of trusting and turning to – especially with ideas and strategies? When are university representatives there to further coalition building, to share or even redistribute resources, to uplift and increase visibility when asked – and when are they technicians of power and sustaining hierarchy? ‘This isn’t personal, this is the work’ became a catchphrase and a reminder to me that conflict, even if uncomfortable, can be generative and even essential. Further, in this participant’s very posing of honest questions to me, she was offering a subversion of the power dynamics dominant in most institutional spaces, where non-institutional members are often seen as recipients serving institutional needs and demands rather than as participants to be collaborated with and for institutions to be accountable to. To be able to receive such questions openly – that ‘it’s not personal, it’s the work’ – means continually seeking to look at mechanisms that sustain and reproduce institutional violence.
The participant’s questions that day about the possibilities and limitations of real partnerships with universities – and key lessons to keep in mind when designing such programmes meant to support those working on the front lines – have stayed with me all these years and informed future iterations of programme design. What does, and could, it mean for a university entity to not just be of use to movements but also, and perhaps most importantly, to be accountable? Researcher and participatory action scholar Michelle Fine frames such ambition in terms of what she calls ‘fragile solidarities’. She notes the long legacy of engaged scholars within academia who aim to serve and be of use to communities. She writes,
like the arts, independent media, and social movements, in moments of crisis, critical participatory action research can carve out delicate spaces for fragile solidarities and collective inquiries, and even more valid research, where we might join with others to collectively ignite the slow fuse of the possible
(Fine Reference Fine2017, p. 123).
Such fragile solidarities are not automatic but must be earned, nurtured and carved out.
There is an imperative connection between the core argument the women in the Plaza are making – ‘It wasn’t the fire, it was the state’ – and the observation the facilitator in New York was offering: ‘It’s not personal, it’s the work’. In those two seemingly different catchphrases, there is a clarity about the variety of forms that violence takes, as well as the production and reproduction of such violence, and the choices that public and private institutions and the people within them face. There are myriad of ways that institutions are invested in a spatial scheme that distances responsibility with regard to violence, rather than seeing themselves as part of the problem and therefore accountable for acting in response. Higher education is not exempt from this, but rather very much implicated.
In placing attention on the role of institutions and institutional perspectives themselves as possible sources of violence, rather than as an automatic site of justice, the altar of the girls of Guatemala serves as a reminder to expand the frame. Indeed, through their years of protest and waiting and memorialising the legacies of these girls, they note that violence is not just physical, but also structural and historical and material. And in their public protest, they build on years of work by activists and organisers around the globe who argue and demand that they are not just bodies on the street. Rather, they are making policy and legal claims as knowledge holders and demanding to be heard as such.
Given this, there is an urgent call being issued to those in positions of power who seek to be responsive – be it policy-making within government or by administrators in the university. Part of the role and hope would be to not just hear and respond to the demands put forward, but also to act deliberately to upset the very reproduction of inequality in the first place. That part of the work of institutions to be accountable to movements and those most directly impacted by violence is to direct the processes of formulating and enacting policy to help to change and disrupt the very conditions that allowed for such violence to take place to begin with.
5 Activist-scholar sensibility
While much has been written about being an activist-scholar researcher, very little has been written about being an activist-scholar administrator. The category does not yet exist. And it reads on the surface almost as an oxymoron, at least in the United States university context, and perhaps deeply ambitious in these times. It is not straightforward what such a category would mean, what principles or features would make someone an activist-scholar administrator. This is especially true if working as an administrator of an entity operating within a large, public, state-run university that must adhere to the rules and regulations established by a distant and multilayered governmental bureaucracy. Strict blueprints are often provided for administrators to be able to see and know their roles, often so that the daily act of business can be undertaken.
Yet, the examples used within this article, of viewpoints raised and argued by front-line organisers and grassroots activists, from Guatemala to New York, conjure a question as to what kind of sensibility a category of activist-scholar administrator would entail. Two moments that are seemingly distinct from each other but which I offer as related point to the need to listen and turn to those most marginal and most impacted by violence to inform one’s daily work and practices. Within the university context, such practices or self-reflections are often reserved for those either studying or doing research (through field work, etc.) or those who are teaching (i.e. through a hierarchical relationship of pupil/teacher). Having worked for over a decade as an administrator across multiple universities, I am interested in what is arguably also a third way: what would it mean to partner with those most impacted by violence and made marginal, and to incorporate their perspectives into institutional practices? To do so would require expanding and challenging whose knowledge counts as expertise. And that such knowledge, experiences and wisdom be treated not as something to extract or take, nor as something to reform or shape, but to genuinely ask: how the university and those in positions of power within it could most be of use, based on a mutual respect and valuing of a range of knowledges.
This orientation, this third way of working with and alongside means the work is never just theoretical, but also practical. In other words, such an orientation within a university context would mean not just turning to the wisdom and knowledge of those on the front lines as an epistemological commitment or a listening to. It also would require a series of operational actions that seek to transform such institutions from the inside out, and that visibly translate into concrete daily institutional practices. Such weaving or alignment of mission and everyday operations takes significant effort and self-awareness and is rarely given adequate time or space. This is no easy task, and I’m not suggesting I have always found successful ways to do it. However, in a time when United States universities are deeply under siege, perhaps such questions need to be less prescriptive (i.e. ‘how to’) and more collaborative. That is, we know we need a range of roles and ways of doing such work, both within and beyond institutions, and as such, what would be an activist-scholar administrative sensibility?
Insights from the women in Guatemala and the front-line organisers in New York provide the ground for thinking about such a sensibility, offering lessons for pursuing a different way of understanding. Three lessons that stand out are the need for: (1) bureaucratic imagination, (2) an iterative orientation and (3) analytical expansion. These lessons arise from my experiences of doing value-driven work within structures that may not want, desire or see a need to change and may even be resistant to such change. Tensions inevitably arise along the way, sometimes stemming from such contending. Such tensions are not separate from, but rather part of and even central to such work. This orientation and way of approaching administrative work is attuned and attentive to how power, geopolitics and reward structures, for example, all shape daily actions, including my own. It holds a stance of remaining curious and self-aware, being open to discomfort in the effort to transform the mechanisms available.Footnote 13
To engage from an activist-scholar administrative orientation requires bureaucratic imagination. By that, I mean the flexibility and creativity required to work within systems and structures to follow the rules, but not just follow the rules. Bureaucratic imagination means finding ways to be flexible within hard-to-change systems and institutions. This often demands a commitment to do everything possible to align values and outcomes while working through and adhering to the structures at hand. After that exchange in New York, for example, a programmatic lesson was the importance of valuing activist time and expertise, and the multiple institutional forms this valuing could take, such as by ensuring participants are paid and their labour is visible. Even if the sums are not nearly enough, holding a structural orientation toward valuing such contributions as labour is an important way of valuing activist expertise and wisdom. If compensating such labour is difficult within university settings, perhaps it means finding partners who can play this role. Certainly, it means an orientation that is both determined and flexible. Rather than seeing bureaucracy as a set of policies and procedures to be strictly adhered to and followed, in this case, it also requires being open to reinterpreting them and persistently asking how everyday practices align with mission and values.
By an iterative orientation, I mean that a key part of being accountable to movements and activists when working from an institutional site of power is to continually ask what will be of greatest use to their work. So often institutional programmes and policies are self-interested and operate with visible and less visible agendas. Any ‘activist-scholar’ administrative work should not only consult those being engaged but also ground such work in the explicit hope that the outcomes of such consultations are to be of use to the communities and those being consulted (Wiebe Reference Wiebe2016). This sensibility is one of ethics, grounded in a commitment to being able to change and pivot if needed. Doing so often requires factoring in multiple feedback loops along the way. In the case of that New York workshop, it was not sufficient to ask at the beginning of the convening what people hoped to get out of the experience. Rather, the question needed to be asked at every step of programme design. Part of the non-personal ‘work’ of an administrator activist-scholar is to create ways to ask – and continually revisit – if and how such programmatic engagement might have value. This means being iterative and responsive, consulting at multiple steps along the way rather than only after ideas and project design are fully baked.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, to aspire to do administrative work with an activist-scholar sensibility necessitates analytical expansion. By that I mean an openness to the ways that new analytical tools are both needed and necessary, especially under the institutional constraints and rigid hierarchies that so often are present in policy and academic spaces. To find new orientations, the administrator activist-scholar must continually challenge themselves, and others, on the narrow analytical tools so many of us hold and are trained to hear – including a basic orientation of what ‘counts’ as knowledge. This seems like an easy step yet is often overlooked.
In this current moment, resisting and countering institutional violence through activist-scholar administration could be undertaken in any number of ways based on positionality and hierarchies. Some interventions may be more legible and recognisable within institutional settings, other actions necessarily less so. But given the ways well-intentioned ‘listening’ of activists and organisers can run the risk of inadvertently reproducing violence, a proactive orientation or sensibility is certainly needed. There are a range of examples of how states, as well as institutions, including universities, reproduce and skirt over the alignment of mission and daily practices. Knowing that violence can be epistemological, structural, material, political and institutional therefore demands not just superficial or surface-level shifts in how to listen or engage, but rather an active and continual grappling about one’s own sensibility and orientation toward such work.
6 Conclusion
The last stop of the Guatemala delegation was the presidential palace. A grand building located directly in front of the central square where the Plaza de las Niñas sits, there is significant security to get through the heavy doors. The delegation group – comprised of Nobel Laureates, regional activists and three international NGOs – were coming to meet with the newly elected Guatemalan president and vice president, who had run on a ticket of anti-corruption but whose entry into power had been highly contested. The group was to deliver a document co-written by women from twenty-three organisations representing civil society, Indigenous leaders, defenders of land and territory, LGBTQI+ people, among others, and that served as a joint statement on what was heard in the various conversations over the delegation, including at the Plaza de las Niñas. Among the messages shared was the importance of prioritising solutions proposed by local activists, and holding their voices as integral to decision-making processes, particularly in critical issues that impact their lives.
Sitting in the audience, watching the exchange, I thought of the women standing outside, in front of the palace, in the Plaza, and what their message for the president would be. It wouldn’t only be about individual justice or acknowledging the harm to the girls from the fire, although that was important.
In the years since the fire, while its impact has been recognised and some individual perpetrators held accountable, a fundamental missing piece remains that keeps the women going back to the Plaza to publicly hold space and protest.Footnote 14 Their clear and resounding call for greater accountability echoes from the Plaza de las Niñas in Guatemala City to the workshop in New York. And central to such a call, particularly in this historical and political moment, is an expansion of the very contours of what counts as violence. Adopting such an expanded understanding of violence would mean many more people would need to work to counter it. And such a job does not lie solely at the feet of policy-makers or government officials, but also very much in spaces of the academy.
The multiple forms of violence discussed in this paper – material, physical, epistemological, structural and institutional – are linked, not distant. A spatial scheme that aims to obscure such linkages is often part of the problem. This paper gestures toward the kinds of questions that administrators located within universities or institutions might grapple with to surface the ways they might be implicated in such violence, and sets forth the hope that to inhabit an ‘activist-scholar’ stance would be to try to do business differently. Such strategies for listening to those most vulnerable from an institutional perspective require a basic orientation and sensibility toward seeing those marginalised as real experts and knowledge producers – a perspective that is easier for most institutions to agree with in words, rather than practice.
Acknowledgement
I offer tremendous thanks to the activists, organisers and facilitators discussed in this paper. My thanks also go to Kavitha Mediratta, Michelle Fine and Amy Lira, as well as to the editors of this special issue, Mariana Prandini Assis and Matthew Canfield, and to two anonymous reviewers for generative comments that made this paper stronger.
Open access
