Digital Imaginations: Rehearsing Decolonial Undocumented Labor Movements in Higher Education

Abstract

As a scholar-activist devoted to anti-racist, decolonial, femme-inist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist struggles to decriminalize undocumented people in the United States, I continuously organize in the hopes of altering or dismantling the systems and institutions that perpetuate violence against marginalized, Black and brown communities. Inspired by the website Torn Apart/Separados, which maps Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the settle U.S. (volume 1) and the amount of money congress representatives have received from ICE (volume 2), and as part of my dissertation, I wish to create a network graph visualization --eventually accompanied by written and audio interpretations in at least English and Spanish-- of the overlaps between ICE funding congress (potential effects on public policy), government representatives benefiting from public universities, and universities' ultimate complicity with ICE. In tracing "money moves," this project lays the groundwork for activist mobilizations that deploy working-class, labor movement tactics as a means to organize within/against the imperial, neoliberal university (in this case, Big 10 institutions). Finally, my larger aim is to create inter-state, national, and international (no-border) networks of communication and support for the communities to which we belong and/or with whom we are in solidarity.