By Ajay Parasram
Following the first Carleton University “Refugee Crisis” Teach-In on Oct. 2, the Leveller’s Ajay Parasram sat down with Fiona Jeffries, author of the recently published Nothing to Lose but Our Fear. Jeffries was the Teach-In’s facilitator and one of its main organizers. The conversation touched on the effectiveness of the teach-in model, its history on university campuses, and future plans for teach-ins. Here is a transcript of the conversation:
AP: Why did you decide to organize a teach-in on the subject of the refugee crisis?
FJ: We had two concrete objectives for the teach-in: one was to elaborate a critical and nuanced global perspective on what the media has labelled the “refugee crisis” in the wake of the massive numbers of people fleeing war in Syria. I say this in quotes not because it isn’t a crisis—of course it’s a crisis for the people who are fleeing. But the term suggests something new and suddenly urgent when it’s clearly not. The war, and the displacement it has caused, has been reverberating for years. Also, when the commercial media suddenly declares a crisis, it often triggers a whole series of events and interventions that extend and intensify that crisis rather than ameliorate it. So we wanted to try to untangle all that through a collaborative discussion.
The second objective was to use this time together to strategize ways that Carleton as a public institution can step up and provide concrete solidarity to people fleeing their homes. One of the ways the university can do this is to commit to sponsoring and supporting more refugee students. This would be great for the university community.
By doing this, we hoped to harness the public space of the university to intervene in the suddenly huge and urgent discussion about the great numbers of people fleeing war, conscription, dispossession, and repression that was provoked by the surge of people and images of unspeakable despair and violence. The outpouring of feelings of solidarity and empathy with the people fleeing war in Syria was very heartening, especially in our present climate where harsh, xenophobic attitudes about migrants—especially those hailing from the Middle East, Africa, and Central America—feel especially high.
AP: How has the Canadian state’s response influenced people’s actions?
FJ: So we saw two things happening at once: a climate where an increasingly harsh and coarse attitude towards migration had been fostered and normalized was suddenly shaken loose. The image of the dead child on the beach in September seemed to jolt many people awake and we suddenly became painfully aware of the consequences of this mounting social stinginess.
Over one weekend, the top search term in Canada was “how to sponsor a Syrian family.” People’s reaction of overflowing solidarity was really significant and should not be underestimated. But you could also see that there was a rapid closing in around the discussion and the scope that it could take in mainstream public discourse. Quickly, a well-meaning feeling of “we have to do something!” was funnelled into “doing things” that coincided with state objectives.
The discussion about why so many people were on the move became about private sponsorship of refugees and the larger, longer term and more politically incendiary questions about war, imperialism, climate change, political violence, racism and xenophobia, and so on were supplanted by the idea that the most effective way to express solidarity and caring about people was to raise money for private sponsorship and support the government’s declaration of war on ISIS.
Private sponsorship is really important for addressing the immediate crisis and we’d never want to suggest this is somehow misguided or wrong. We just wanted to open up the discussion that was clearly narrowing into one that focused almost exclusively on private [fundraising] solutions rather than political analysis about what the realm of the possible is. We wanted to try to keep the discussion open and to introduce more critical perspectives on how the crisis is first and foremost about political will, not economic imperatives.
AP: Why is the teach-in a useful way to broach these important issues?
FJ: The teach-in form is ideal for battling complex political and social questions. The first teach-ins were organized by professors and students on US university campuses in the mid-1960s, in protest over, and as an attempt to understand the dynamics of, the Vietnam War.
A teach-in is where people—in this case students, staff, professors, and anyone else at the university—come together to try to develop their understanding of a complex situation or problem in a way that guides towards some kind of positive, concrete political intervention. In this sense, it is about learning collaboratively through the development of analysis as well as political organization or intervention.
AP: You mention collaborative knowledge emerging from the teach-in model. Can you say a bit more about what makes this model of public education so useful?
FJ: Well I guess in terms of usefulness, if you want to call it that, in my own experience, participating in teach-ins on university campuses has been enormously helpful in developing my own critical capacities for thinking about the problems of the world and the ways in which the complexities of it are often treated as unknowable by non-experts. My first experiences of teach-ins were as an undergrad at Simon Fraser University when the US declared war on Iraq and carried out what came to be called the first Gulf War or “Operation Desert Storm” in its sanitized terminology. I didn’t really know much about the Middle East or Canadian or US foreign policy and I learned so much from these lively, heated discussions among students, professors, solidarity activists, and so on. It was all incredibly informative and felt like a really powerful way to learn and think differently about how the whole story was being framed.
AP: What concrete next steps came out of Friday’s teach-in at Carleton?
FJ: We formed three committees that would work on specific initiatives that we identified through the course of the teach-in. I was really impressed how quickly, efficiently and enthusiastically we came up with these concrete plans—all within less than 2 hours!
The first initiative is a letter writing and petition campaign that asks the university to step up and put more resources towards sponsoring more refugee students on an ongoing basis, not just in this immediate crisis.
The second is a more performative push to urge the university community to extend greater solidarity to refugee students. Many Canadian universities are standing up and offering a lot more active support to refugee students.
The third project that we decided upon is having more teach-ins and community gatherings to develop a nuanced understanding of today’s complex global conflicts and the processes driving the kinds of mass displacement and dispossession we are seeing today, from Syria to Eretria to El Salvador.
AP: What’s the plan for future teach-ins?
FJ: We’re planning to do another teach-in and community meeting at the Bronson Community Centre on October 21. We will have speakers presenting on different aspects of the crisis and learn about the different initiatives that cities are taking to extend a hand of friendship and solidarity.
We’ll also have more gatherings at Carleton to help us keep up with events and the different responses we can pursue as the crisis unfolds.
This article first appeared in The Leveller Vol.8, No.2 (October 2015).
