After the tigers of Occupy Princeton mic-checked recruiting events for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, a few concerned alumni collaboratively drafted an Open Letter to Princeton Community to send to the Princeton Alumni Weekly and the university administration. If you are an alum and want to sign it, shoot me an e-mail (also, let me… Continue reading An Open Letter to the Princeton Community
The first time I walked into the Occupy Oakland encampment, I felt like I had set foot in utopia. I had been to Oscar Grant Plaza, in front of city hall, just a few days prior, but left the occupation’s first general assembly quickly after it devolved into an endless series of ideological pontifications: this… Continue reading The Zero Sum Movement
A few Mondays ago, I saw my future. No, not a vision of being arrested and thrown in jail—this was a more long-term vision. It was a premonition of my future as a college professor: standing in the front of a lecture hall filled with bored-looking undergraduates, their tired faces half hidden by laptops (open… Continue reading Apathetic Apologetic
I didn’t really sleep the first few nights after my arrest. Exhausted as I was by a night spent in jail—coming on the heels of several nights where academic work and organizing meetings had kept me up late—I felt a profound sense of disquiet, and returned to that most familiar and comforting of behaiors for… Continue reading Gentle / Strong
At long last, my first peer-reviewed academic publication is available online in the journal Ethnography, at least to those with access to an academic database. I wrote this as my Junior Paper at Princeton, and I have to confess that my thinking on some of these issues has evolved and matured a bit. Still, given… Continue reading In Between Protests, I Also Do Some Sociology
Yesterday, I was beaten, arrested, and jailed for participating in an act of civil disobedience against the privatization of education and criminalization of dissent in California. I’ve spent the last day trying to process what happened, and writing this is an attempt to get it out of my mind and on to paper (having spent… Continue reading Arrested
Let me start this blog post by saying that if I had done something actually illegal—well, more specifically, something for which I feared prosecution—I would not be posting it on this blog. Sorry to disappoint. This will make for my third activism-related post in a row, though. For those looking for different content, I suggest… Continue reading I Smashed A Bank, And I Didn’t Like It
Tomorrow, we march. I’ve been attending so many meetings, assemblies, flyer-ings, and marches in the last few weeks that it’s hard to see them as distinct events. But still I tell myself that tomorrow is critical; that in a week that saw coordinated crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations across the country, it’s a crucial time to… Continue reading On Efficacy
In fifteen minutes, I’ll be heading to Shattuck and Central to take part in the first General Assembly of Occupy Berkeley. I spent the start of this week frantically searching for plane tickets to get me to New York, hoping to stand up and be counted among the protesters of Occupy Wall Street before police… Continue reading 99% Plus One
Here’s an exciting topic for a blog post: bathrooms. News of the imminent arrival of seventeen shiny new graduate students to the sociology department somehow got lost in the University of California bureaucracy, so for the first five weeks of school, none of us had keys to the departmental bathroom. As a result, we had… Continue reading Flushing Public Education
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 