In this video essay, I explore accelerations of racial capitalism, carceral logics, and policing in a mundane space—higher education campus parking lots. My approach is informed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore's invitation to find a "broader lens" for thinking about prisons as socially produced institutions that are "deeply intertwined with the organization of our cities, of our rural areas, of the state, and of the economy" (Elmi n.pg). As well as, Julia Oparah's declaration that "a symbiotic relationship has arisen between the academy and the 'prison-industrial complex'" (99). Similarly, Royel Johnson and Jude Paul Matias Dizon provide the "college-prison nexus" as a framework for studying higher education modes of carceral state power, defined as:
the symbiotic relationship between postsecondary education institutions and the penal system—the ways in which campus structures, policies, and practices coalesce in the surveillance, control, punishment, and criminalization of minoritized and socially and economically disenfranchised populations. (511)I argue that campus parking is an overlooked zone wherein higher education systems stage expansions of policing and punitive racial capitalist technologies.
To examine the "college-prison nexus" with a "broader lens," this video takes inspiration from abolition filmmakers Brett Story, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and others who use art to explore how prison abolition theories and practices can be "actualized visually . . . not just as an abstract, academic exercise, but as a radical and emotional interruption of . . ." sensationalizing and problematic representations of prisons and prisoners (Elmi n.pg). Like Story and Reynolds, I aim to show the mundane ways that carceral systems shape space and time. This artistic approach strives to respect Savannah Shange's commitment to Black life, which refuses to "spectacularize Black abjection" and instead "center the quotidian state practices that render blackness itself as abjection" (6).
By sampling news and social media reports, I show that campus parking is one (of many) spaces where university administrators collude with private companies and police to make colleges and universities less accessible and more punitive. Building on Bruno Latour, abolition scholars Eli Meyerhoff, and Erin Dyke discuss how universities take for granted how people "travel through space-time to campus" because of their ability to leverage "grades, credits, tuition, and truancy laws" (273). Through the use of montage video methods, I animate how these aforementioned higher ed forms of retaliation are coupled with (re)privatization and (re)financialization of public higher education campuses, aimed at shooting back at leftist student organizing beginning in the 1960s. Using archival and found footage, I investigate the evolution from free campus parking systems in the U.S. (coinciding with affordable education for elite whites) to parking fee systems (concurring with unpayable tuition and student debt), finding that campus parking fees and privatizations are one of higher education administration's methods for repressing Black, Brown, Indigenous, Feminist, LGBTQIA and other student organizing.
Inaccessible campuses negatively impact everyone, but not equally. Black, Brown, working class, disabled students, faculty, low-wage campus workers, and caretakers of elderly and children are disproportionately burdened by campus spaces, like parking lots, that weaponize fines and fees. Parking fee systems, I contend, accelerate predatory debt markets, increase campus policing, and enforce college campuses' racial-gendered and classed hierarchies by reserving space for campus elites while robbing space, time, and money from campus subjects deemed less valuable. Building on Jackie Wang's theorization of "carceral capitalism" which elucidates how "antiblack racism, and not merely the profit motive, is at the heart of mass incarceration," I show how profit motive and anti-blackness are at the root of higher education management approaches to campus parking lots. (85). For example, in the video I show one example of campus parking lots as "carceral spaces" found in the 2020 police takeover of UCLA's Jackie Robinson Stadium for a "field jail" used to detain protestors, including UCLA students, demonstrating in Black Lives Matter protests nearby (Vanoni). Hence, campus parking lots are not just increasingly monetized spaces but also zones for staging anti-blackness, prisons, and policing.
Considering the calculated effort higher education institutions (overall) invest in luxurious landscaping and other lush grounds keeping, in this video essay, I offer castle logics as a language to help us think about university modes of spatial care and neglect. I argue that higher education's castle logics are remnant of the university's origins and kinships with the medieval church, reflected in its exclusionary attitude towards outsiders versus its royal treatment of campus elites. Using castle imagery and metaphors, I explain economic and land theories, including, David Graeber's theorizations of financialization in higher education that shift campuses towards "neofeudal rent taking," of which, campus parking lots are one example. Likewise, extending Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira Da Silva's discussion on "accumulation by dispossession," I scrutinize higher education campus parking management tactics that use overflow parking to push out surrounding communities "living in the shadow of the ivory tower" (Baldwin 1).
Spurred by Legacy Russel's exciting Glitch Feminism Manifesto, in this video essay I employ over-the-top-rainbow, avatar-glitch-and-glitter aesthetics to rebel against stereotypes of femininity in the academy as frivolous distractions from "real" scholarship. My performance refusal(s) of academic gendered and aesthetic norms, specifically, the demand to conform to minimalist and/or masculinist visuals and performances—especially in conversations about economics—is an experiment in subverting the who and how of scholarship (prohibitions against "excessive" femininity in academe overwhelmingly target Black, Brown, working-class white women, and queer people). Elsewhere, Russell declares that abolition itself is a technology, meaning a "proposition towards a way of subverting, transforming, and hacking technologies as we know them towards emancipatory means" ("System"). In addition to playing with and scratching at academic modes of misogyny, my bimbofied, satirical performance as narrator(s) aims to transform and hack the complicit role(s) that white women play in conversations about carceral systems. Finally, The Commons builds upon a history of artful and provocative video essay innovation in the field of communication studies, foremost, Paul Edwards, whose "essays are full of unreliable narration, artful contradiction, and polyvocal . . . collages of ideas worth engaging in their complexity" (Terry).
Since making this video, I have heard from graduate students and faculty in Canada, and Europe eager to discuss how pervasive punitive campus parking systems are in other locales. One scholar pointed me to indigenous artist I'thandi Munro's art installation which repurposes parking tickets she received as a student due to lack of campus parking at a university campus in Nova Scotia to critique and reject parking fees on stolen land; Munro declares, "No, this is my land. I'm not paying for this ticket. This is where my ancestors are from. How dare you make me pay for parking on my own property?" (Mullin). While Munro's powerful refusal of higher education's disciplinary debt and fee systems is not featured in the video, other examples of abolitionist uses of campus parking lots for organizing are showcased.
My hope for this video essay is that it contributes to broader conversations about police, prison, and debt abolition on higher education campuses by stimulating conversations about how campus borders are an important space for resistance.
Acknowledgments: I want to thank Dr. Patricia Suchy, Drew Wallace, Elvis Bendaña Rivas, Irina Kruchinina, and Honorable Dr. Bonny Mack for all the consulting, caretaking, conspiring, cackling, and cajoling that led to this video essay. Special thanks to Dr. Davarian Baldwin for generously sharing campus parking sources and other recommendations that improved this project, and thanks to Dr. Brett Story, Dr. Billy Saas, and Dr. Armond Towns for their helpful feedback.
Works Cited
Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.
Chakravartty, Paula, and Denise Ferreira Da Silva. "Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism—an introduction." American Quarterly vol 64. No. 3 (2012). pp. 361-385.
Dyke, E., & Meyerhoff, E. "An Experiment in 'Radical' Pedagogy and Study: On the Subtle Infiltrations of 'Normal' Education." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing vol 29 no. 2 (2013). pp. 267-280.
Elmi, Rooney. "Centering the Margins: An Interview with Brett Story on Her Debut Documentary the Prison in 12 Landscapes." SVLLYwood Magazine, vol. 1, no. 3, 2018. N.pg.
Johnson, Royel, and Jude Paul. "Toward a Conceptualization of the College-Prison Nexus." Peabody Journal of Education, 1-19. (2021).
Graeber, David. "Anthropology and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.3 (2014): 73-88.
Mullin, Morgan. "Nocturne 2020: I'Thandi Munro's Parking Impass." The Coast Halifax, 4 Sept. 2022, https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/nocturne-2020-ithandi-munros-parking-impass/Content?oid=25006753.
Oparah, Julia C. "Challenging Complicity: The Neoliberal University and the Prison-Industrial Complex." In The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, 99-122. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Reynolds, Laurie Jo, director. "Space Ghost." Video Data Bank, School of The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, https://vdb.org/titles/space-ghost. Accessed 3 Sept. 2022.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Penguin Classics, 2021.
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020.
— "System Errors: Abolitionist Technologies and Aesthetics NTS Radio." Lecture presented at Revolution is Not a One-Time Event. 2020, Retrieved October 28, 2020, from https://www.nts.live/shows/revolution-is-not-a-one-time-event/episodes/system-errors-abolitionist-technologies-and-aesthetics-17th-august-2020.
Shange, Savannah. (2019). Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.
Story, Brett. "The Prison in Twelve Landscapes." film. Canada: Oh Ratface Films, 2016
Terry, David P. "Paul Edwards and The Video Essay as an Extension of Oral Interpretation." Liminalities 13.1 (2017).
Vanoni, Maggie. "UCLA Professor Calls out University for Use of Jackie Robinson Stadium in Protester Detainment." Los Angeles Daily News, 2 June 2020, web.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2018.
» Misty Saribal (she/her) is a multi-media performance artist, scholar, and activist who explores performance and digital storytelling roles in broader discourse about prison abolition and liberatory world-building. She presently co-facilitates a Cops Off Campus study group about abolitionist responses to gender and sexual violence, attended by campus organizers across Turtle Island. Her scholarship challenges higher education ties to policing and prisons and supports transformative justice responses to racial, gender, economic, and sexual violence on-and-off campus. Misty is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at Louisiana State University.
