Organizing Knowledge: Analyzing Power in Housing and Agriculture, and Reflections on Activist-Scholarship as Method

• In Event: Activist-Scholarship as Method: Re-Thinking Knowledge Production, Community-based Sociality, and Liberatory Futurities

Abstract

This presentation explores the model of activist-scholarship developed by scholars and community organizing working together in the Organizing Knowledge Project. Arising from questions posed by community organizers, the Organizing Knowledge Project’s collective research projects that analyze how power works in the two industries in predominantly Latinx and Indigeneous communities in California’s Central Coast. The geography enables the study of housing in urban/suburban neighborhoods in South County and agriculture in rural areas of North County. The project utilizes GIS mapping address the question of who owns what and interviews with tenants and farmworkers to understand conditions and impacts of ownership inquiries and interviews with farmworkers. The study is situated within the particular political economy of the Central Coast and the local campaigns and movements for tenant rights and labor rights. In addition, Fujino explores the development of a solidarity campaign between Lajas and San German, Puerto Rico, and Santa Barbara, California, centered on turning spaces of abandoned school sites into community building and mutual aid in the midst of US administrative rule in Puerto Rico.

Author

• Diane Fujino, University of California-Santa Barbara