Episode 3: Intersectional Solidarity with Dr. Fernando Tormos-Aponte
4:42PM Sep 16, 2021
Speakers:
Dr. Ian Anson
Dr. Fernando Tormos-Aponte
Keywords:
umbc
solidarity
puerto rico
intersectional
movements
social movements
intersectionality
folks
experiences
feminists
people
thinking
scholar
social science
wrote
research
marginalized
activism
black
theory
Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, associate professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research that they've been performing in recent times. Quantitative, qualitative, applied empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.
On today's episode, I'm really excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Fernando Tormos-Aponte of the School of Public Policy at UMBC. Dr. Tormos-Aponte is a scholar with several academic appointments. In fact, beyond his assistant professorship at UMBC, he's also a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists Center for Science and Democracy. Man for some reason, it seems like we always feature social scientists on this podcast who stay incredibly busy. You know, actually, when I put my powers of social science deduction to the test, I think it may not really be that much of a coincidence. after all. It's not the greatest superpower in the world, but you know, selection bias detection, man, I guess it kind of has a ring to it. Anyway, Dr. Tormos-Aponte is known especially for his work on social movements, like the climate justice movement and movements to protest inequality. His research focuses on the role of social movements in pressuring governments and corporations to address issues of inequality. It offers insight into the pathways by which social movements manage to survive over time and become politically impactful. You know, I'm reminded of the incredible power of social movements over the past couple of years. When I think back to some of our own earlier episodes. Dr. Kaye Whitehead, for instance, reminded us of the ways in which the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 era fostered a renewed urgency among Black Lives Matter activists. And on the next episode, we're going to hear from several UMBC undergraduates, Lorra Toler, Desi Chitic-Amaya, and Kayla Brooks, about social activism in Baltimore since the death of Freddie Gray. While these stories and many others showcase the urgent need for more research on contemporary social movements, Dr. Tormos-Aponte's recent work has shed light on a vital concept in the field. Iintersectional solidarity. In our interview, Tormos-Aponte explains just what this concept is and how it matters for all kinds of organizations, groups, and political movements. Let's take a listen.
Dr. Tormos-Aponte, thank you so much for agreeing to be with us today. We're really excited to have you and looking forward to our conversation. So it's really apparent from both your scholarly publications and your many media appearances, that I mean, really, you've got a lot of research interests. And recently, I've noticed that you've been writing a lot on this theme of intersectional solidarity, which is a concept that I'd really love for you to unpack for us today. What is intersectional solidarity and how did you become interested in it?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you, first of all, for this invitation, and I'm happy to be here. So intersectional solidarity is a notion that black feminist and mestizo feminists, third world feminists have been developing for quite some time now. And it is the notion of, it's a form of solidarity that puts intersectionally marginalized peoples at the forefront of advocacy work. So what do we mean by intersectionally marginalized folks? These are folks who live in the intersection of different marginalized groups. So for instance, folks who identify as being black or as at the same time as being a woman, or indigenous or Latinx, among other kinds of marginalized groups, in our societies, when they live at these intersections, and they experience life as a result of the interaction between these different groups, this, these different lived experiences. These are folks who we consider to be intersectionally marginalized. And traditionally, we have been thinking about solidarity in ways that did not really prioritize intersectionally marginalized groups. So when you look at the sort of history of thinking and acting in ways that are in solidarity with a particular group, usually we used to think about solidarity as something that we would express towards workers. So labor solidarity was one of the like, main ways in which we thought about solidarity. And in that sense, we're talking about solidarity between folks who may share class condition, right, their economic conditions or economic circumstances, folks, so folks who are workers who do not own the product of their work, who do not own the means of producing that work. But over time there, there have been a lot of feminists who have said that this is a really limited way of understanding solidarity. And that we should think about solidarity in broader ways and in ways that are more deeply connected with other forms of marginalization that include but are not limited to subjugated class, classes, right. So working classes and the working poor. And that's how I've been working to expand on this notion of intersectional solidarity. So essentially, what I've been doing with that work is to look at the implications for activism of the work on intersectionality. And, you know, folks usually think about intersectionality, as something that emerged with the coining of the term intersectionality, by Kimberle Crenshaw. And even though Crenshaw was an important contributor to these, to this tradition of thinking, there have been a number of feminists and black feminists particularly who have said, actually, this is part of a broader tradition, it's been traced back to feminism, not just within the United States, but globally, of working class, women of color, women from what it was known as the Third World global South nowadays, and these are folks who have been struggling, but who were usually neglected and marginalized within movements. So intersectionality was really something that emerged out of activism. And that is now being used in more widespread ways in academia. So with this work, I'm hoping to contribute to efforts to bring intersectionality back to its activist roots, and to draw the political and activist implications of this term.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like this is an incredibly vital project for the field of social movements, and I think that really, you've struck on something, you know, just just very meaningful in terms of the core conceptualization of this idea. And I think in doing so, you know, people who have read your research, people who have have have seen this out in the field, have noted that you've done a lot of work that is really sort of closely linked to specific methodologies to sort of investigate this, this concept on the ground. And so of course, this is a podcast about the social sciences. And you know, a lot of the time we're going to talk about data at some point, right. And so, for example, on an earlier episode, I spoke to Professor Zoe McLaren, and she was talking about some of her research processes that involve really kind of big data processes, right, where she was stitching together, these big quantitative public health data sets, sort of having to merge datasets together in order to arrive at the specific kind of conclusions that she made about public health crises and infectious diseases. But obviously, this kind of research is going to lend itself probably to some different kinds of data collections, I'm really interested in going from kind of concepts to to sort of this this actual empirical research that you're performing. What kind of methods are you bringing to this? And what kind of data are you collecting to really explain to audiences and to, you know, develop and to validate, essentially, the idea that intersectional solidarity is, as you say, this sort of global concern?
So this is a great question, and I'm happy you asked it. And what's funny is that I've never used a data set for any work on intersectional solidarity, not because I'm against using data sets, I use it for other work. But this work really emerged of my reading of, of feminists of color, and feminists from the global south, and particularly black feminists in the United States. So I was particularly inspired by The Combahee River Collective Statement.
Could you tell us a little bit about about what that is?
Yeah, absolutely. So The Colbahee River Collective Statement was a group of folks, the Combahee River Collective was a group of folks, many of which are now known as some of the most important feminists in our times. And they came together and they were critical of their exclusion from the civil rights movement, as women, and they were critical of their exclusion from the women's movements as black women. So they said, this is why we need to have activism that centers those who are marginalized by virtue of being, of experiencing life, not just through subjugated race, but also through a subjugated class, and gender. So they drafted the statement in I believe 1975 and this statement was a wonderful sort of, it was the first mention of identity politics, which of course, are now thought of as of putting identity before everything else, and particularly before class concerns. But if you read the Combahee River Collective, you notice that they're working class women. And they said, no, we have to also address the ways in which existing economic systems exploit us and marginalize us as well. So they were very attentive to the issues of class. They just think that if you only focus on class, that you're never going to end marginalization generally. Because you're always going to have subjugated races and genders among other lived experiences. So when I read this Combahee River Collective Statement, I said, this has implications for activism today. And that's how I started thinking about this. And I wrote it first, as a theoretical piece, not really thinking that I would do much empirical work with it. And the funny story is that I wrote it for a prelim exam as part of my time in graduate school. And I had forgotten that this prelim exam was due like the next week, and I wrote it in like, a weekend. I locked myself in my office and wrote it in a weekend. And it turned out to be my most cited publication, ever. I don't know how that happened. But it goes to show that sometimes reading stuff really attentively and all in one time, and not having time to waste can help.
So that's a super relatable story, by the way, that's incredibly relatable.
All this emerged, again, I didn't expect to come back to it. But, you know, from an empirical standpoint, it was more of a theoretical, I was hoping to make a theoretical intervention and to sort of highlight this important contribution, I think, people before me had done to bring it back into our current academic debates. But I remember when I was an undergrad that I once had a poet in a workshop that I attended at University of Puerto Rico, who said the following thing, he said, we should only write about the things that we are privileged witnesses of, and it took me years to digest this. I at first did not know what he meant, or what that meant for my own work. At that time, I asked for myself, like, What am what am I a witness of? Not anything exciting, or anything that I think this speaks to many other lives. So I could never really relate very much to that, until after that.
What an idea for a social scientist to contemplate, right?
Yeah, right. Usually, we're taught to be far removed from our subjects, we're told to be far removed from what we want to study. But what this poet was telling me now what we should be writing about the things that we experience, the things that we live, the things that we participate in. So I resisted for a long time doing this, because this is really counter to what a lot of us are taught in our programs in graduate school. And I also resisted writing about what I had experienced and lived in Puerto Rico, because I was always told that if I wrote about Puerto Rico, I was going to be known as the Puerto Rican who wrote about Puerto Rico and nothing else. I had no ideas that had anything to bear on anything else. And it's very easy to forget about Puerto Rico.
You get this epithet thrown around sometimes, right? This idea of "me-search," right, where it's just researching myself. And so so what does this really tell us about the broader social world, which I you know, I use the word epithet intentionally, right.
And in this case, I couldn't even say it was about me, because this is a black feminist and mestiza feminist term. This wasn't even me-search, right, like, what was I doing? I had no idea. Well, a few semesters after that, hearing that from that poet I became involved in a two-month long occupation of our university in Puerto Rico, a strike that demanded that the university refrained from raising tuition. And we were pretty steadfast and we won. We blocked tuition hikes. And I that was what inspired me to write, to study movements. But I was still resisting studying Puerto Rican movements until I went to the United States, and I started writing about movements. I started learning more about intersectionality and started thinking like, what movement do I know, do I really know about? What movement do I, have I been a privilege witness of? And it was the Puerto Rican student movement. And I looked at it through the lens of intersectional solidarity. And I drew from my own participant observation of it as well as the participation and experiences of my friends who were activists in that movement. So I started interviewing folks, going back. When I went back for the breaks, I interviewed my former colleagues in the movement. And so the data, if you can call it that, was our own observations. So some folks have call it auto ethnography. Others have call it participant observation. And you know, one of the ways in which we analyze this data is that we try to understand how people assign meaning to these experiences. How did, how did they experience this? How do they describe these experiences? How do they make meaning of these, of these structures in play, where they're trying to be active in? How do they make meaning of the policies that they're trying to address? Or change? How do they make meaning of the people who are they are in contention with the people who are they're trying to compel to change a policy? And that's what that's the kind of data that I've been using autoethnographic data and then collaboration with my friends. Folks, like Shariana Ferrer Nunez, black feminist activists in Puerto Rico, who went on from being an activist in the Puerto Rican student movement to being an activist in the feminist movement in Puerto Rico and creating a new black feminist organization. So then we wrote together about her experiences. And in that point, it was fantastic. It was this complicity, because I bet we were able to sort of combine her lived experiences with what I had learned from my own experiences and movements, as well as what the literature was saying in my second, my third piece on this topic was with her that we just recently published, and it was about intersectional solidarity in the feminist movement in Puerto Rico. We called it the intersectional synthesis, because it's, it's the idea that people arrive at this approach of solidarity of enacting solidarity, this intersectional approach to enacting solidarity, through the combination of theory and practice, it is in practice, that they can contemplate these theories and just their practices. And it is through practice, that they also contemplate their theories and reassess them and re theorize. And we started taking the words and experiences and thoughts of people on the ground and participants of these movements, as theories themselves, as theory builders, and started thinking about movement generated theory. And that's what I'm trying to inject in our conversations and the academic realm. So that's kind of what, where we're at with that project.
I just love that you've brought us this perspective on social science and what it means to do scholarship in this in this realm, especially given, you know, again, our earlier episodes where we've seen sort of this broad, you know, just, just as broad a set of perspectives, from, you know, the the biggest data kind of large and quantitative data sets, bringing us powerful insights to help us combat infectious disease to this the autoethnographic method, really bringing richness, right, to an understanding. And again, I really appreciate this idea that, that right, these theories are forming the conversations, but the conversations themselves are generating, right new theory. And in that theorizing, we're becoming stronger as social scientists and becoming better at understanding really what the goal is, right? We're better at understanding the reality of the social world that we're living in. So yeah, I super appreciate that insight. And I wonder, you know, I wonder about the next steps as well, you know, so obviously, with this intimate familiarity that you have, with these cases in Puerto Rico, I wonder if you're going to continue to work with these groups, or if you're thinking about also applying these this kind of framework to other groups, you know, for example, I mean, something that popped into my head sort of immediately, as we're talking about solidarity is teacher unions in the United States. And some of the ways that, you know, we've witnessed kind of intersectionality occurring as as they exert power in surprising places, right, sometimes places where you think that, you know, organizers would have much success, you know, kind of the so called red states to paint them with a very broad brush. Are there other places that you're thinking about applying this framework, or maybe working with other scholars to better understand the global dimension of intersectional solidarity?
Yeah, absolutely. And I should say that there's a big debate on the extent to which intersectional solidarity is the concept that travels, and I am personally someone who thinks that it's not up to us to consider whether it travels or not. I think that it already did, like people are using intersectionality already beyond the confines of the United States. So has it, does it travel? Yeah, it already did. So, yeah, I think that we can definitely start assessing and understanding experiences, lived experiences and episodes of contention outside of the United States through this intersectional lens, particularly recognizing that the intersectional sort of tradition, the tradition of intersectionality is not an United States tradition and that it draws a lot on African diasporic experiences. It draws a lot on experiences from India, it draws a lot of experiences from activists in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and in the global south more generally. So I don't think the question is whether the intersectionality can travel beyond the United States, I think it's the United States that's been traveling to try to understand it. So yeah, I think we can apply it in other settings. And I've seen fantastic applications of it. So for instance, the work of Erica Townsend-Bell, who does some fantastic work on black feminist activism in Uruguay. So one of the things that Erica Townsend-Bell, who's been an inspiration to my work, argues is that in the process of engaging and activism, movements, ask themselves, what are the actual categories of identities that are relevant to the issues that are dealing that they're dealing with. And on the basis of those considerations, those reflections on the categories of identities that are relevant, they form agendas, they form movement structures and leadership, around the sort of understandings of the relevance of different identities. So I thought that, that's one of the things that informed my idea of the synthesis between theory and practice, and they kept that came out of Uruguay. So I mean, a black, a black woman scholar, doing work in Uruguay, you know, talk about, you know, traveling and intersectionality, who traveled where I don't think there's a point in trying to understand, like, claiming sort of that sort of genealogy, as exclusively belonging to one particular group, although folks have been very careful to recognize the importance and an unprecedented, like, unmatched contribution of the black feminist experience in creating this tradition of intersectionality. And that is important, something that I think I like to continue to contribute to, to recognizing. Where do I see myself applying this? I'll be completely honest, I never had a plan to do this. This was never my plan. Intersectional solidarity was was a term that came to my head. And then I realized that it was not only, you know, something that I that I was thinking about, but that my friends back in Puerto Rico were living, like, they were themselves building an intersectional approach to organizing. And I found that to be fascinating. And it seems like other colleagues of ours are finding it fascinating too, because they're reading it and citing it. So I think that I'm privileged in the sense that I've witnessed a lot of activism in Puerto Rico and that I have access to that community, which is something that, you know, we need to consider when we're doing fieldwork and qualitative work as well. Like, we don't just get to play with numbers behind the screen, like we actually have to build trust in a community. Like not everyone gets to go into this community, into a black feminist group in Puerto Rico, and say, Hey, I'm gonna do research on you. And people be like, sure, interview me and then publish it. Right?
You get the impression, right of the 50s, you know, a researcher with the horn-rimmed glasses and the white lab coat, you know, sort of walking into a community with a clipboard, saying, Oh, hi, I'm going to study you, right. That's not really how it works.
No. And, you know, one thing that we should be careful of not doing and something that I think my colleagues in Puerto Rico have pointed out to me is that they've had a lot of folks who have been really extracted right in the way in which they do research, like they go in, they ask their questions, then they take all that knowledge that they generated, the actives generated, and then they publish it as their own. You know, when you start questioning, like what point was that your idea or like, you know, there...so I've moved into offering and authorship, co-authorship to the folks who I'm interviewing on the ground, who's who are doing this kind of work to recognize that they are also co- producers of these thoughts. And I'm the one who's fortunate to be an observer, an analyst of them.
And deservedly so. Right. I think that's that's a really reasonable reaction to the idea that these people are co-producers of knowledge in this paradigm. So yeah, it's it's a wonderful, I think goal, is to bring the participants themselves into the production of research that we would think is part of the credit and credibility cycle of academia. Right, which is something altogher apart.
Absolutely. Something to add to that. Before we move to the next topic is there's this scholar who I find to be very fascinating, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who has been a contributor to these, this feminist school, that, this group that I worked with in Puerto Rico hosts multiple times a year, La Colectiva Feminista en Construccion. So Nelson Maldonado-Torres has these I think it's called the Ten Theses on Decolonialism. And I find it fascinating. One of the things that Nelson Maldonado-Torres says is that no, we should consider people to be knowledgeable about their own lived experiences, like they are actually able to speak for themselves. And they are actually able to generate theory. So that's part of the reason the, this is part of the way in which we build a decolonial way of doing things in our academic spaces is by, you know, recognizing their own intellectual processes, abilities, and contributions, and then recognizing their their their ability to theorize. So I hope that this is something that more and more folks can can approach in their own work.
I hope so, too. And on that note, I think I have one question for you that I always ask our interview guests. And that is, obviously you're a researcher and somebody who's active in the field, but you're also somebody who's involved in teaching, and I was wondering if you had any advice for fledgling social scientists who are hoping to get involved and to improve their social science as they work towards potentially a career in the field?
Yeah, absolutely. Um, a number of things, you know, one thing is that we're often told to just stay in our lane, and focus, focus, focus on getting out of your program. Sure, let's get out of your program. But don't just don't just go through your program without having a meaningful experience. You know, I think that we, when we're in a program, particularly the programs that I think we have been able to develop at UMBC, I think we have an opportunity to really question our own ideas and understandings of the social world. And we should take that opportunity. So I think that we shouldn't be too concerned with trying to be perfectly objective all the time and removed from the people and the questions that we're trying to understand. I think that we should come closer to those spaces that we're trying to understand. And, you know, build trust with the communities we'd like to work with. And to think about our work as something that is not just done, for the sake of advancing knowledge and remove ourselves from this tradition of building knowledge for the sake of building knowledge, and thinking more about, you know, what are we really trying to do? What is the impact of what we're doing? And who are we doing it with? And how are we doing it? You know, questioning the extent to which we can develop a tradition of work, an agenda of work, that is helpful for addressing social problems, and advancing advancing efforts to address questions of equity and justice. So I think that we're in, in a perfect setting to do that. So we should definitely harness that opportunity and, and seek mentorship from multiple folks who we have in our institution and beyond, who are wonderful, wonderful guides for, for this kind of work.
Dr. Tormos-Aponte. Thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate all of these insights. And I just wanted to mention that, as you mentioned, several pieces of research from colleagues and other scholars, we're gonna throw those in the show notes, so that so that everyone will be able to access those when they when they want. So again, thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate your time. And yeah, we look forward to seeing what you do next.
Hey, it's my pleasure. And if you are a UMBC student and you're looking for a nice class to take next semester, make sure to look out for my Social Movements class this spring 2022.
I really enjoyed getting to hear from Dr. Tormos-Aponte about intersectional solidarity, especially because his recent scholarship has been so central to the field of social movements in recent times. But as our conversation really emphasized, it's not just Dr. Tormos-Aponte's theories that have caught scholars' attention. It's also his methods. On today's Campus Connection, I want to highlight another UMBC scholar who's been using related methods to make vital discoveries about power and agency in Colombia. Dr. Tania Lizarazo is an associate professor in the UMBC department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication. In recent years, Dr. Lizarazo has co-produced a digital storytelling project called Mujeres Pacificas. According to the project's website, it was created in collaboration with the Gender Commission of COCOMACIA , a black farmers organization that manages part of the collective territories achieved by black communities in the Colombian Pacific. As an alternative to writing-centric narratives, the stories collected and created as part of the project exemplify storytelling and survival, as performative and intentional everyday practices. Valuing daily and repetitive actions as essential part of the embodied knowledge that makes activism possible highlights “being there” and “showing up” as the pillars of the comisionadas’ political practice. I thought this project really resonates with some of Dr. Tormos-Aponte's work, in part because Dr. Lizarazo conceives of this social scientific contribution as an integral co-production between scholar and research subjects. Now when I hear the stories hosted on the Mujeres Pacificas site, I'm reminded of how powerfully we can build, reorient, and reinvigorate our social science theories just by listening.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. We'll have much more for you on the next installment of Retrieving the Social Sciences. Stay tuned. Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland.
Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning.
