I have talked in the past about the politicisation of immigrants, their reduction to visual cliche and indeed there is a lot more to be said on Tent City, Maricopa, AZ particularly.

I even began this blog way-back-when with musings on physical & psychological borders and unseen landscapes that define flux, unknowns and action.

AIDING IMMIGRANT PASSAGE: The Transborder Immigrant Tool

I just received an email from Bryan Finoki about some unpleasant political muscling down in San Diego.

I am proud to support Ricardo Dominguez and to add my signature to the petition to save Professor Dominguez’s tenure:

Target: UC President Mark Yudof, UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, UCSD SVC Paul Drake

Sponsored by: UC Multi-Campus Research Group in Internationalism and Performance
Ricardo Dominguez (Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD) is currently being threatened with criminal action and the revocation of his tenure by UCOP and several UCSD senior administrators. This is a long, rapidly-developing story.  Time is of the essence. Please sign now!

UC Office of the President has reportedly been upset over Ricardo’s involvement in the Transborder Immigrant Tool – these are recycled cell phones loaded with software that points border-crossers to caches of fresh water in the desert, obviously saving lives. It’s a controversial project, to say the least; and Ricardo has received death threats from people in the SD community and beyond. The project was picked up by the national and international presses, and CNN named Ricardo one of its “Most Interesting People” of 2009 because of the project. Several Republican congressmen also recently sent a letter to UCSD demanding that the project be ceased and Ricardo be censured. In response to this, the university has been scrambling to find a way to shut it down. Importantly: the project has been included in every one of Ricardo’s professional reviews over the last few years, all of which have gone successfully (and have been signed off on by this very SVC); in addition, the project has been FUNDED by UCSD (and yet again, signed off on by this SVC). Now that the controversy has gotten attention in DC, they’re reversing course.

More recently, as part of the March 4 actions, Ricardo’s bang.lab created a virtual sit-in on the UCOP web site. A virtual sit-in works in this way: participants go to a specified web page, which continuously “refreshes” connections to the target web page (in this case, ucop.edu). This obviously increases traffic to that site — much like a live sit-in at a specified locale — with the potential effect of making it too busy to accept new incoming connections. It is similar, in form, to what’s called a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack” (DDOS). There are several critical difference between a virtual sit-in and a DDOS:  a DDOS is prolonged and unending, used by various governmental groups to censor a wide variety of free speech groups, activist groups, etc, and non-transparent (the creators of the DDOS set up virtual robots to blast a given site with millions of hits, and hide the creators behind various firewalls and filters. A virtual sit-in is open, does not use such “robots,” and the creators are identified freely).

SIGN THE PETITION

Please sign the petition below to protect academic freedom and tenure from politically-motivated attacks.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-the-de-tenuring-of-ricardo-dominguez

THE RESEARCH

Click on the sheet below for a larger version.