Looking Back and Moving Forward
Return of the Shanghai Jews: Early Attempts at Reconciliation and Restitution with Refugees
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin Ostoyich
During the Holocaust, approximately 15,000 to 18,000 Jews found haven in Shanghai when the rest of the world closed its doors to them. When one juxtaposes the history of the Shanghai Jews with the nightmarish story of Auschwitz, one sees that lessons of humanity can be discovered even at times that are seemingly devoid of hope and dignity. The message of hope represented by the history of the Shanghai Jews is one that has been slowly emerging over the last two decades. More and more scholars are turning their attention to this history. Nevertheless, their focus has tended to stay narrowly on the Jewish experience within the Shanghai community itself, leaving much left unexplored. For example, very little has been written about what happened to the Shanghai Jews after the war. What did the West German government do when the Shanghai Jews—refugees who had lost most, if not all, of their belongings, had endured hardships, and who, in most cases, had lost relatives who had not accompanied them to Shanghai—asked for restitution? The paper examines how the Germans started the process of atonement. The study is based on restitution case files from the Bremen State Archives. The paper concludes that the Germans scrambled to respond to the Shanghai Jews, but issues of bureaucratic protocol had to be established, and the process by which retribution payments were distributed turned out to be a long and frustrating one for the former refugees.
The Face of Educational Social Injustice in the Twenty-first Century: The School-to-Prison Pipeline
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bev Freda Jackson
At the turn of century Dr. W.E.B DuBois asserted that the "problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." In 2018, decades after the elimination of de jure segregation the face of institutionalized racism thrives through evidence of the "color of mass incarceration" and its feeder phenomenon the school-to-prison pipeline. In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States declared separate but equal unconstitutional overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). However, in 2018 the legacy of Brown, its tenets and ultimate aims remain a dream deferred. Consequently, we currently realize the phenomenon of the school-to-prison pipeline impacting populations of children of color. Through dialogue on the empirical realities of what we know on the school-to-prison pipeline, this paper examines national statistics on suspension and expulsion, thereby introducing a dialogue about impact and outcomes on student populations of color. In this session, the theme of reconsidering freedom is interwoven into the deconstruction of the school-to-prison pipeline discussion. While empirically supporting the national increase in quantifying the realities of the pipeline, the dialogue also reframes the numbers in ways to introduce the audience to restorative justice techniques and diversion disciplinary practice methods to explore how we reverse this trend. The school-to-prison pipeline represents a manifestation of historic injustice evidenced in present-day school drop-out factories. At the root of the school-to-prison pipeline are social and economic inequalities, reinforcing the historic disparity of equity in education in the United States.
Pet Poultry: An Ethnography of York County, Pennsylvania Chicken Keepers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jamie Kinsley
Today, eggs occupy refrigerator shelves in every convenience store, yet members of the York County community in Pennsylvania laboriously raise small flocks of chickens as a food source. With increasing globalization comes benefits including higher standards of living, access to basic human needs such as clean water and healthcare, and cultural awareness. However, globalization and the American food-systems infrastructure have grown to industrialized heights where commodification leads to abstraction. To combat this separation from our food source, people exchange consumerism for a connection with their food primarily via gardens and poultry rearing. Their place in the backyard builds kinship similar to that of family where their multi-species familiarity defies the anthropocentric tendencies of biosociality. Primarily through ethnography, I interview and observe twenty households in York County Pennsylvania who raise chickens. While some of the participants own chickens for various functions such as experimentation, entertainment, education, or political activism, I primarily analyze the meaning derived from chicken ownership through the lens of ethical foodways and companionship. As a fellow chicken owner, I recognize that raising chickens is not a necessity; it is a choice. None of the participants grew up around chickens; they all intentionally sought out the practice as a way to free themselves from the industrial food system. This study ultimately argues that raising backyard chickens offers pastoral fringe living, where the participants enjoy the proximity of civilization paired with the romanticized practice of homesteading as a way to counter the hegemonic food system.
