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Tomashi Jacksons midcareer survey Across the Universe at the ICA Philadelphia probes the histories of culturally resonant people and places as they relate to sociopolitical issues surrounding matters of race and the state of democracy in the United States. Jacksons multilayered surfaces feature materials like quarry marble dust and Colorado sand,as well as screen prints from film stills and photographs, which highlight notable historical moments. Her workHere at the Western World (Professor Windhams Early 1970s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir), 2023, pictured aboveis one such piece that will be on view in the exhibition through June 2.

You have a rigorous research-based art practice. How did that begin?

The earliest works in the show begin in 2014 when I was a student, with explorations into employing research-based methodology. Ive always been asking questions and trying to visualize language and relationships. At the time, I was experimenting with researching histories of American school desegregation. In particular, I was focused on the cases that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. As a student at Yale, I had access to the law library. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the many cases of this landmark legislation. Anyone who uses interstate travel, public education, or public broadcasting is a direct beneficiary of this legislative package.

I found myself with lots of questions about public-school transportation and a long legacy of devaluing the lives of children of color and public space, as well as defunding and depriving public schools of resources after the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. I had faith that if I focus on an area of research or a particular question that something is going to come of it. I didnt know what the work was going to look like. I didnt know what the solution was going to be. But I just started reading the cases.

How did you become interested in public spaces and resources?

Im from Southern California. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was very impacted by the prominence of murals and narratives painted in public spaces. Theres this part of me that I cant really shake: a desire to inquire about issues of public concern and embed them into a process by which new material is produced. The first works start there.

I was exploring the perception of color and its impact on the value of life in public space. As an adult, I was able to again study Josef Alberss Interaction of Color, which I had first learned in elementary school. This work gave me an opportunity to start exploring color relationships chromatically and societally. I realized that the impact of color perception and optical illusions initiated by interactions of particular colors which make us see things that arent really there. I saw an echo in the case law that I was reading.

Subsequent bodies of work follow this methodology, with site-specific research on such topics as the relationship between public transportation and voting referenda in Atlanta, for example, as well as a comparison between the contemporary use of third-party transfer programs seizing paid properties and the historic property dispossession of people of color in New York. Lets talk about some of your latest works, which were produced during an artist residency in Boulder, Colorado.

There are three new pieces in the show that use marble dust from the nearby Yule Mountain Quarry, which produced the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and mostif not allof the great monuments in Washington D.C.

Not unlike your earlier works, you employ a rigorous material process that alludes to the history of abolition and democracy in America. How do you create these multi-layered surfaces?

Before I know what the image is going to be, Im building a surface with material that is symbolic to me of a place in some way. The material used for Here at the Western World, for instance, is made of a quilting liner. I spent a lot of time in southern Colorado, outside Denver in the San Luis Valley, and I made friends with people who gave me such textiles. I attached the quilt liner to a piece of raw canvas. I used paper bags, which I separate from the handles. Over many days, I soaked the paper and unfolded it carefully, before laminating it into the surfaces of the work. The pieces become kind of like animal hides that are stretched onto the wall and cured in anticipation of stretching them onto awning style frames. The surface of the piece was then encrusted with sand from southern Colorado and marble dust from the Yule quarry.

There are additional layers and images constructed on top of that surface as well.

The halftone line image thats projected on the surface in yellow hues is an image of a particular classroom from This Is Not Who We Are (2002), a documentary film about Black communal experiences in Boulder from the 1800s to more recent years. The catalyst of the film, which questions Boulders standing as what some have called the happiest place to live in the U.S., is a controversy over excessive police force used against a Black student at Naropa University in 2019. I included an image from the film of Professor Wyndhams classroom.

Printed on the pink vinyl is a still that I created of a very quick moment from 1972 home video footage of the choir from the Second Baptist churchthe only black congregation in Boulder for many yearssinging, which resonated with my own experiences going to church growing up in Los Angeles. These places historically in the United States and other colonized countries are where people of color gather for respite and liberation. There are these moments that happen where people are trying to get closer to freedom by gathering together for release and for mutual exaltation.

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Tomashi Jackson Probes American Democracy in Her Multilayered Work - ARTnews

WASHINGTON, D.C. In a new brief, nine Republican secretaries of state are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take a case out of Pennsylvania pushing the independent state legislature theory, a radical legal theory that could upend American elections.

The friend of the court brief submitted Tuesday by Republican secretaries of state from Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Wyoming and West Virginia argues that President Joe Biden (D)s enactment of a pro-voting executive order violates the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, Republican secretaries of state argue that the policies of Executive Order 14019 usurp the states and Congresss legislative authority pushing the radical ISL theory.

The Republican secretaries of state are in the company of 11 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and a far-right think-tank, the Claremont Institute, which also submitted friend of the court briefs in support of the radical ISL theory on Tuesday. The Biden administration has waived its right to respond to the petition in the Supreme Court.

If adopted by the Supreme Court, the ISL theory could mean that only state legislatures can regulate federal elections. In practice this could mean that all other parts of state government governors, the courts, the people or even state constitutions themselves would not be able to set the rules governing elections. Last June, the Supreme Court rejected this theory in a 6-3 decision in Moore v. Harper.

Since the Supreme Courts decision in Moore v. Harper, Republicans have been attempting to revive the theory through new lawsuits. In January, Republican state legislators from the Keystone State filed a lawsuit alleging that Bidens Executive Order 14019, which was passed in 2021 to promote voting access, violates the U.S. Constitution. The executive order directs the federal government to look into a variety of efforts to expand voting rights, including making federal workers and resources available to help staff polling locations as well as allowing federal agencies to share data with states that wish to establish automatic voter registration efforts.

Previously, the trial court dismissed the case for lack of standing, but in late April, the Republican plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to take up their case while an appeal is still pending in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Arguing that only Congress can enact federal laws preempting state legal provisions regulating the times, places, and manner of Congressional elections, the Republican legislators who brought the case contend that Bidens executive order and other challenged policies cannot be implemented in Pennsylvania.

Now, nine Republican secretaries of state are also asking the Supreme Court to take up this radical challenge. The Elections Clause provides for states, not the President of the United States, to regulate state voter registration systems and designation of other agencies to provide voter registration services, the brief argues, further pushing the radical idea that only state legislatures can regulate elections.

Read the brief here.

Learn more about the case here.

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Republican Election Officials Support Radical Theory to Upend American Elections - Democracy Docket

The early months of summer on college campuses are usually bustling with proud parents ready to celebrate students years-long efforts to obtain a college degree.

But this year, many college campuses look very differentand some are eerily emptyas thousands of students and even faculty members established tent encampments on the lawns of nearly 100 campuses in protest of institutional investment in weapons, equipment, and technology that undergird and support the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Protesting students want their universities to sever partnerships and financial programs connected to the Israeli government and military.

Faced with student protestors demands, educational institutions are finding themselves between a rock and a hard place. Divestment can be seen as taking sides when universities aim to stay apolitical, and more critically, it can reduce the financial returns that universities rely on to support their operations and activities. For student protestors, the view is that their university a moral authorityis profiting from a military campaign they vehemently disagree with. For universities, the view is not nearly as clear cut. The situation means many schools are navigating how to respond to students demands and protests, along with the interests of their network of donorswhile also managing how their reputations will be affected by each move they make.

Antisemitism is also a serious concern, given that the basis for the protests arose after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Some Jewish students have reported that Pro-Palestinian encampments make them feel less safe on campus, pointing out that some of the chants protestors have adopted are antisemitic and have been co-opted by Hamas to call for the murder of Jews. Although the chant is being used rampantly, for activists, its taken on a different meaning, but for some Jews its a threat.

Its an especially complex decision for schools that have large endowments or networks of donors who can influence the investments and financial decisions of an institution. And making it even more difficult, the aggressive crackdown many schools deployed to dismantle student encampments, including police equipped with riot gear and military grade weapons, has spurred national criticism on the handling of protests on campus. The aftermath of these responses is both sizable and expensive: Thousands of people have been arrested in relation to campus protests; hundreds of student activists have been suspended or expelled; and several schools opted to cancel commencement ceremonies.

Archon Fung, a professor who teaches political science and citizenship at Harvard Kennedy School, told Fortune, civil disobedience is, by definition, breaking the rules, adding that such acts have an important place in democracy. Fung cited Columbia Universitys student protests of 1968 in opposition to the Vietnam War and the schools expansion into Harlem.

Fung explained that historically, student protest encampments have helped successfully end wars and global occupations that many experts now agree were injustices, like the war in Vietnam and South African apartheid. Fung also recalled how administration responded to student dissent over South African apartheid at his own undergraduate university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he attended in the late 1980s.

At the time, he said, the main acts of civil disobedience were calls for divestments from South Africa, and occupying buildings, as well as pitching tents, was one of the techniques. Police were sometimes called to clear those demonstrations, he recalled, but added that administration at the time was more open to dialogues with protestors and that the level of aggression against student demonstrators today is notably more intense.

Its hard for me to imagine any university president having an open debate with a representative of the pro-Palestinian cause, but I do miss that because I think the university should be a place of reason and the exchange of arguments back and forth.

In the past several months, hundreds of students have established Gaza Solidarity Encampments at more than 60 college campusesand while the protestors demands vary at each institution, they largely focus on divestment from Israel, financial transparency, and granting amnesty to students who face disciplinary action over campus activism.

Colleges have been rife with student dissent since the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Southern Israel, which killed over 1,200 people. Israels response, a catastrophic military campaign that killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, is now entering its ninth month. The encampment students also aim to show solidarity with millions of Palestinian civilians enduring the highest civilian casualty rate of any war in the 21st century. As Israel continues its military campaign, which is seen as the most destructive in recent history, Palestinians are suffering calamitous levels of disaster, including famine and disease outbreaks, and a crisis, in which at least a thousand children have lost limbs and over 19,000 children have been orphaned because of indiscriminate bombing in the war.

The most aggressive campus responses to encampments include authorizing police to mass arrest students and suspending, expelling, and evicting student activists. More than 4,000 people have been arrested so far on college campuses across the country, and incidents of disciplinary action are rampant, too. At least 53 students have been suspended and evicted from Columbia University this year due to participation in Gaza Solidarity Encampments, according to Columbia Spectator, the universitys publication. The University of Southern California barred a Muslim valedictorian, who graduated with a minor in resistance to genocide, from delivering the roles trademark commencement speech.

The University of Southern California declined Fortunes request for comment.

According to Donald Saleh, who has worked as an enrollment planning strategist and consultant for many universities for the past several decades, many institutions will need to consider how their reputations have been impacted by their response to student demonstrationsespecially in terms of retaining incoming prospective students.

Saleh told Fortune, a number of institutions that are in the headlines right now about these protests have large enrollments of international students. They often travel thousands of miles to attend schools and want to make sure theyre going to be someplace safe.

When the police are coming in on these campuses to break up the protests and take down the encampments, they dont do that without consultation with the leadership of the campus, Saleh said. The reputational concern is that College X or University Y could not manage this without having police come in, make arrests, and physically remove people from the campus.

These responses could be a cause of big financial concern, he said, if incoming prospective students decide to attend school elsewhere, which he said could be a common scenario.

At the very least, the protests have been affecting how schools engage with admitted students. The University of California, San Diego canceled campus tours for at least two days in May after students established encampments; student protestors at Washington University in St. Louis interrupted a packed admitted students event in the university chapel, unfurling a banner that read Divest from Palestininan Genocide, on April 13; and at New York University, tours were rerouted to avoid student encampments.

I would be taking more students off the waitlist to protect against the possibility that some of those students who have already committed are going to leave, Saleh said, adding that dwindling enrollment numbers can have a financial impact on a university.

Many colleges across the country balance their budgets on a year-to-year basis, he explained, and use the operating plans to predict how many students to enroll and award financial aid packages. When those estimates are disrupted in a negative way by events on your campus, he said, missing your target by just 2% or 3% has budgetary implications that ripple through at least for one year, often for more.

Another cause of reputational concern for institutions, he said, is how the donors of an institution may respond to how they handle student demonstrations.

If Im a donor and I have an affiliation with groups of students who now feel that the campus environment is threatening to them or unsafe for them, Saleh explained, my inclination to donate to that campus is going to be significantly less than it might have been four months ago. Saleh told Fortune he believes this reputational effect is something college administrators, fundraising staff, and alumni affairs employees will be very concerned about, especially as it relates to donors.

At Columbia University, for example, more than 200 students were arrested during two police raids on April 18 and April 30, the latter of which, coincidentally, is the same day 700 students were arrested for protesting the divisive Vietnam War and Columbias expansion into Harlem more than 50 years ago. As it turns out, Columbia restructured how its administration makes decisions, like police authorization, after those infamous protestsand in authorizing the police on campus this spring, broke those rules explicitly.

A Columbia University spokesperson told Fortune a small group of academic leaders had been in dialogue with student organizers to find a path that would result in the dismantling of the encampment, but they were not able to come to an agreement.

When asked specifically about violating the 1969 pact, a Columbia spokesperson did not respond to several of Fortunes requests for comment.

Fung, the Harvard professor, told Fortune, having been on campuses for 20 years and seeing a lot of different campaigns of civil disobedience, I dont recall anything nearly like this level of police response in the post-Vietnam era.

The level of aggression in schools responses is also made more egregious considering the student demonstrations have largely been nonviolent and peaceful in nature.

Roosevelt Monts, a professor who specializes in American citizenship and has been teaching at Columbia for 30 years, told Fortune that reports of violence and intimidation, by the student protestors are isolated and very much a minority, and that many colleges are responding to concerns of safety subjectively, rather than through documentation of incidents.

All things considered, Fung insists that the right for students to peacefullywhich means nonviolentlyprotest is important. Civil disobedience is saying, look, the ordinary democratic channels are blocked up. We cant get a hearing for this great injustice. So were going to break the law, he said. Sometimes, it moves society forward.

Its an opinion Monts shares, too. Students are often ahead of the curve on social and cultural issues, he said. This might be one of those issues.

Several of the worlds largest international organizations have been sounding alarms about the humanitarian crisis caused by Israels military campaign in Gazathe secretary of United Nations has been urging a cease-fire, and the International Criminal Courts prosecutor announced on May 20 that he has requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his defense chief and three Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes.

Many European countries, including France, Belgium, and Germany, announced their governments would enforce the arrest warrants if it becomes issued by the international court.

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Civil disobedience and calls for financial divestments 'have an important place in democracy'but many schools also ... - Fortune

The NBC peacock logo is seen on the door to the NBC Experience Store at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Michael Nagle/Getty Images hide caption

The NBC peacock logo is seen on the door to the NBC Experience Store at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

It's been about a week since NBC fired former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel just days after hiring her as a contributor.

The network drew a ton of backlash for the decision, much of which came after it aired an interview with McDaniel done by Meet the Press host Kristen Welker.

In that interview, McDaniel was openly critical of the Republican party and reversed course on some claims she made in the years after the 2020 election.

So why was she hired? What happened that led to her departure? And what does this politics-to-pundit pipeline say about the state of our democracy? We examine the role of television networks that the media plays in our elections and governance.

We also take a look at the role social media plays in moderating what kind of political information makes its way to our screens.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced recently it will be shutting down CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring platform, two months before the election. This announcement has led to criticism from journalists and researchers alike, citing concerns about transparency surrounding viral content.

What role does misinformation on social media play in shaping our elections?

A statement from Meta on CrowdTangle and its content moderation policies:

"This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted. This change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends. And now, people are going to be able to control whether they would like to have these types of posts recommended to them."

"Our definition of political content is content likely to be about topics related to government or elections; for example, posts about laws, elections, or social topics. Social topics can include content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others."

"CrowdTangle provided an incomplete picture of what was happening on our platforms. We have built new, more comprehensive tools that enable independent study of key social issues, including elections."

Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.

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If You Can Keep It: NBC, Social Media, And Preserving Democracy : 1A - NPR

The world does not yet know exactly what happened in Alexei Navalnys final hours. We do know that he was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, then after returning to Russia to continue his public opposition to Vladimir Putin and his regime, was immediately arrested and spent years isolated in abusive conditions in prison. His death last month in a remote Russian penal colony was almost certainly an assassination.

Navalny left a legacy of courageous advocacy against corruption and in favor of a free Russia. He also left behind a large number of fellow imprisoned activists whose lives are in grave danger.

There are lamentably too many political prisoners in Russias jails to name here. One who faces perhaps the greatest risk is our colleague, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a politician, journalist, and historian who has advised and advocated for the human rights organizations that we lead, the Free Russia Foundation and Human Rights First, respectively. The U.S. government imposed a handful of new sanctions in connection with Navalnys killing. We believe the United States also must urgently act to prevent the killing of another important voice for democracy in Russia: Vladimir.

Like Navalny and others, Vladimir has faced shocking persecution from the Russian government for his advocacy, including poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that investigators have linked to the Russian intelligence services and to Navalnys poisoning. Vladimir barely survived those attacks.

It is not hard to see why the Kremlin has targeted him. He forcefully condemned the Putin governments invasion of Ukraine, just as he opposed its repressive policies at home. Like Navalny, when he returned to Moscow in April 2022, he was quickly arrested. In a sham trial, he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison. No opponent of Putins war has been given a longer prison term.

Vladimir has managed to continue writing in prison. He urges opposition to Putin and his war in Ukraine, and he seeks to hold the Russian government to account for failing to investigate his poisonings. But under harsh conditions and without proper medical care for polyneuropathy, a nerve disease he has suffered since the poisonings, a quarter-century in the hands of his persecutors amounts to a death sentence for him even more clearly after Navalnys death.

U.S. diplomacy has secured the release of many Americans in recent years, including three from Russian custody since February 2022, and, as Vladimir himself often observed, during the Cold War the U.S. government played an important role in helping negotiate the release of Soviet dissidents. Negotiating for Vladimirs release would fit with both these traditions. In addition to being a modern dissident, Vladimir is a legal permanent resident of the United States. For more than 10 years, he has divided his time between Virginia where his wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, live and his native Russia. The Kara-Murza familys home-state senator, Tim Kaine, and representative, Jennifer Wexton, have called for the Biden administration to immediately engage with the Russian government in order to secure his release.

Hostage diplomacy can be unsavory, and Congress has created a legal and policy framework for when and how the U.S. government should pursue such negotiations for U.S. citizens or residents. Vladimirs case meets the criteria: most critically, the U.S. State and Treasury Departments have recognized that he is being arbitrarily detained for exercising his rights; the Russian judiciary that sentenced him is not independent; and U.S. engagement is almost certainly necessary to secure his release.

Given these facts, we and other organizations that have worked with Vladimir over the years have been urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to use his authority to find that Vladimir is indeed unlawfully or wrongfully detained. That conclusion is needed to refer Vladimirs case to the U.S. governments hostage-affairs envoy, Roger Carstens, and it would signal to the Russian government that the United States is invested in his fate.

Of course, when it comes to Russian-held political prisoners, the bigger picture includes U.S. citizens whom the Kremlin also has detained. Many of them, including the journalists Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, face patently trumped-up charges. Blinken recently designated Gershkovich as wrongfully detained by Russia, and advocates for Kurmasheva, including members of Congress, are seeking the same determination for her.

Energetically seeking Vladimirs release as well is the right thing to do and would reflect a serious American commitment to protecting political prisoners abroad. Last month, citing Navalnys killing, the organization Freedom House organized a letter that we joined asking President Joe Biden to include Vladimir as an additional focus of any negotiations with Russia on prisoner releases. Especially after Navalnys killing, the United States should provide moral leadership by helping protect voices opposing the human rights-abusing Putin regime and advocating for freedom in Russia.

The fate of democracy in places where it is under brutal attack depends on supporting those who are willing to fight for it. Even knowing that a fate like Navalnys might await them, Vladimir Kara-Murza and other activists have carried on that fight in Russia at great personal peril. They must survive, and the United States must do its part to help.

(Authors note: Vladimir Kara-Murza was vice president of Natalias Free Russia Foundation from 2019 to 2021, and is a senior advisor to Michaels Human Rights First.)

Alexei/Alexey Navalny, Biden administration, Department of State, detainee treatment, Diplomacy, hostages, Human Rights, journalism, political prisoners, Russia, Russia-Ukraine War, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Vladimir Putin

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A Simple US Step Can Help Protect Another Imprisoned Democracy Activist in Russia - Just Security