Toby Ellentuck
Community based learning courses require an increased level of presence and participation from students, and shift analysis to a local domain. In particular this course’s community based projects have made me confront my own positionality in terms of the way that I contribute to gentrification. I appreciated the narrative based approach that our course often utilized in which community members such as Celestina Castillo described their own story. She used her narrative as a way to spark dialogue and describe an experience that is simply not captured in traditional records of gentrification. The most intense effects of gentrification are not expressed by the theories that surround the topic, which reduce gentrification to numbers. One of things that I appreciate most about Spatial Justice is that the course focused on producing a practical body of work in the form of a Scalar site that could be used by community organizations. This course’s utilization of community narratives also helped me reevaluate my own buying practices.
A common thread in the Spatial Justice course was the way that stories served as a tool of activism and as a therapeutic release. Yet my own experience as a student of Occidental College complicated my role. “You’ve got to try Donut Friend!” was one of the first things that I heard when I came to Occidental as a first year. Up until this semester I have not thought twice about my own buying practices, and how I have likely been contributing to gentrifying businesses. Yet my own positionality runs deeper than simply my own individual buying practices. Each time that I interacted with community members in this course it was as a collegiate academic who attends Occidental College, a private liberal arts institution with an endowment of around four hundred million dollars. Furthermore, Occidental’s campus has not been welcoming of community members. Last semester a community resident ventured onto to campus to buy a drink from the Green Bean, Occidental’s student run coffee shop. After buying the drink, the resident was arrested by Campus Safety and forcefully removed from Occidental’s campus.
Occidental’s immense resources allow students to partner with community members to utilize creative tactics as a way to combat institutional and individual gentrifying practices. Karen Anzoategui’s play, Gentrification is Colonization is an excellent example of this type of partnership. The play and its subsequent workshop took place in an Occidental College venue. The workshop in particular emphasized the role and power of students. I was in the student group that helped facilitate bringing the play to campus and documented post-play and workshop reactions of students, professors, and cast members. In examining and editing these interviews together, one theme that has particularly struck me thus far, is how often the notion of being proactive has come up. Being proactive entails a continued commitment that goes beyond the scalar site that is being produced. It entails advocating for departments and student organizations to partner with long term community businesses. Occidental has the resources to combat gentrification on both a macro and a micro level.