#ucsc

[image description: a photo of the UCSC Quarry filled with students protesting for Palestine. Some hold a sign in the background reading GAZA GENOCIDE Funded by U.S. The beginnings of an encampment can be seen.]

As of 5/1/2024, UC Santa Cruz students have now officially set up their own encampment in support of Palestine.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP STRIKING STUDENTS:

Supply Drop-Off | Community Agreements | Donate Funds (alt.)

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SOURCES:

[KSBW] [Lookout] [Marisol LeBrón's photographs of the encampment]

[original ucscsjp instagram post] [UCSC FJP statement]

[source on Venmo links]

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edit 6/12/24: students for justice in palestine at uc santa cruz has published a press release. it is easily the best way to understand what happened that night. please take a few minutes to read it.

uc santa cruz police made a statewide call for mutual aid in order to disband the gaza solidarity encampment located at the main entrance of the campus - initially established at the quarry in the center of campus on may 1, it moved to the entrance on may 20 in solidarity with the UAW strike. on tuesday, may 28, protesters barricaded the main entrance, cutting off the primary way of getting on campus; though the western entrance to UCSC was left unblocked (except for a few hours on tuesday), the main entrance remained obstructed until the raid began late on thursday night. this road blockage is what admin cited as the reason for the raid, along with "campus safety" and "academic freedom".

it's important to note that prior to blocking the road, students had been encamped for 28 days, and had been holding peaceful, law-abiding rallies since october. nothing worked. months of following the guidelines that admin had set, and of course student voices were dismissed and ignored by chancellor cynthia larive and cpevc lori kletzer (the latter of whom, by the way, showed up at 6 am "walking her dog" and smiled while watching her students get suffocated and beaten). the escalation would never have happened if student demands had been met at the very beginning.

hundreds of cops in riot gear from as far out as uc davis showed up to abuse students. over 115 arrests were made, including 3 ucsc professors, transported off by buses that were fifteen years past their intended end-of-use date and had also been servicing the campus prior. is this "campus safety"? is this "academic freedom"?

from just before midnight until approximately 9am on friday, cops kettled, suffocated, shoved, yanked, beat, and bruised students. one got a battery charge for writhing and bumping a cop after another slammed him in the head with a baton. another had a bag placed over their head, leading to suffocation, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. at least two protesters were confirmed to go to the ER that morning; many more have had to seek medical attention for lasting injuries.

arrestees were given a 14-day campus ban, including those who live on-campus (functionally evicting them & preventing access to their belongings), not to mention subjected to horrifyingly inhumane conditions:

you can find more information on various instagram accounts such as ucscsjp, ucscdivest, fjpucsc, ucsc_encampment, & jawsucsc. there's plenty of other organizations and people posting about this, too. please, don't let ucsc brush this under the rug. demand amnesty for the arrestees and protesters. contact any ucsc admin you can find. the uc has been utilizing police brutality to repress student voices across their institution, with ucla and uc irvine also being victims of this violence. do not let them get away with it.

Me and my co-RA, EG, presented this poster at two undergraduate events: San Jose State University's SPARC and UC Santa Cruz's Psi Chi Symposium. Transcription of the post below the "read more" line.

Brief pitch

Mass media narratives and academic research name social media experiences as being good and bad for adolescents; it's not one or the other. Queer youth are especially agentic — they come to these platforms with goals and values already, which shapes their use and digital outlook. As queer youth use social media, they also cohere their identities and align their selves, environments, values, and cultural norms.

We think antifragility, the quality of complex systems to improve following stress or damage, is a useful preliminary lens here. Antifragility may characterize the grit of working through social media, rather than just experiencing or receiving it. So, how exactly do LGBTQ+ youth thrive through adverse experiences as they reconcile opportunities and challenges in their social media environments?

About the three themes

Themes, under Braun & Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis, tell the story of patterned meaning across the coded qualitative dataset (roughly 2-hour videos and interviews of queer youth screensharing and discussing their top 3 social media sites to the original 2022 researchers). Our lab group made these themes in about 15 hours the week before SPARC, so they're quite preliminary. At SPARC and Psi Chi Symposium we invited the people who came up to us to tell us about their own personal experiences or sharpen up our themes. I think of this Tumblr post as a natural extension of that, so please feel free to comment, reblog, and share.

Background and reflexivity

I am a 22 year old Asian-American closeted gay man raised in the San Jose Bay Area, and a 4th-year cognitive science major at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I'm broadly interested in cognitive psychology, abstract systems, human factors, and adult development. Relative to the participants and their data, I am insider to the homosexual and/or sexual minority experience, the (older) Gen Z experience, and the online (fandom) community experience. Therefore, I may be most attuned to the person-environment interface, encompassing a number of processes such as self-disclosure, identity internalization, and digital skill-building. However, I am also an outsider in the sense that I am a cis man, have rarely been able to act or express my gay identity, and my social media use has declined since 2023. Correspondingly, I may have missed or glossed over trans and nonbinary experiences (especially in early proto-theming; hopefully refocused w/ my lab team), why people disclose themselves the way they do, and what internal or external mechanisms exactly drive people to continue to use social media.

My proto-themes before cooperative theming (additional methods background)

These themes may be incorrect, overly complex, or detached from the data. I'd like to post them here as a historical note, however, as they have "seeds" of the later themes, and may provide an even better angle on my background and reflexivity.

1. Pursuing contact with the proximal [should actually be "distal"] queer digital culture requires learning, socialization, dialectic, and broadly beneficial/challenging interactions with peers; LGBTQ+ adolescents close the gap by repeatedly naming the gap between themselves and peers. (Core claim: Sharing queer experiences, speech, slang, discourse, and media approximates social contact; and they do actually have contact eventually. They actively search for peers and peer cultures.)

2. LGBTQ+ individuals (desire to) creating internally complex, heterarchical/rhizomatic, self-moderating, reflective, organized communities and spaces and social norms demarcates these spaces as unique playgrounds of thought, behavior, and culture. (Core claim: Queer adolescents separate their communities from cishet and/or harmful communities robustly. When they co-construct their cultures and perpetuate their own values, they separate themselves from a more suppressive society.)

3. LGBTQ+ individuals broaden initially challenging, negative online experiences into a multivalent/ambivalent ongoing endeavor ["phenomenology" also subs for "ongoing endeavor" imo] to actively alter, negotiate, and control the conditions of their unique [or "tailored"] acculturations. (Core claim: Many queer individuals begin their journey with difficult, even harmful, experiences; but these early experiences go on to stimulate even more identity cohesion and community involvement.)

4. Curative, artistic, and aesthetic digital practices constitute the porous boundary between self and other under queerness, with individuals practicing distinct standards of deferred intimacy and autobiographical record-keeping. (Core claim: When queer adolescents express themselves online, they practice sophisticated strategies of self-disclosure given factors like being closeted/out, being in relationships, being at risk for predators or adversaries, and being mindful of unique site cultures. Social media activity isn't a one to one copy of themselves or their life, or even across platforms. They are able to express themselves richly despite platform limitations.)