USGA and Myatt Center Host Open Forum on Performative Activism

On February 24, the Undergraduate Student Government Association (USGA) and the Myatt Center for Diversity and Inclusion hosted an open forum to facilitate discussions on performative activism. Danielle Cooper, a professor of criminal justice at the university and director of research at the Tow Youth Justice Institute, helped guide these discussions with the audience. She posed questions about what it means to engage in performative activism, determine what constitutes performative behavior, and understand the problematic nature of performative activism as a whole.

Cooper explained the difficulties of balancing his own limitations in the area of ​​his professional status against his ability to engage in meaningful activism in his personal life. “What I do in public is scrutinized…Because I care about children in the criminal justice system and I can’t do my job if I can’t work with them.”

Adrielys Gomez, a behavioral economics student, spoke about what performative activism means to her as a Muslim woman in college. “Do we care about another human being because he practices the same religion as us, or because we have something in common with him?”

Gomez stressed the importance of recognizing these distinctions and being careful about what we choose to voice our opinions about.

Aiden Schwab, a sophomore in forensic science, spoke about his presence as someone trying to bring outside awareness to the affected population. He underscored a point he came back to throughout the night, saying, “If you’re talking about an issue that’s not yours, it can be very hurtful.”

Much of the night’s discussion centered around examples of performative activism on social media platforms. Regarding his own activity around human rights issues online, Schwab said he tends to “retweet instead of talking alone about these issues…I’m not really adding to the conversation, but I share the conversation”.

Schwab also spoke about the harms surrounding mass reposts on social media, saying this activity “bury real information” and “stifle voices that need to be heard.”

Wondering if this activity was performative, he said it was better to do something than nothing.

Liv Night, a young computer science student, shared how she discovered that much of the activity on the college campus was performative. They explained how the notices sent by the administration are directed at “a predominantly white audience” and how the emails are often sent with no intention of action to support them.

They talked about the lack of support they felt from the school and how cultural organizations and the Myatt Center find themselves “understaffed, undersupported, and underfunded.”

Night also spoke about the importance of humility when engaging in performative activism online. “There will always be someone who knows more about something than you.”

The conversation then turned to issues present in campus life that have gone unresolved this year, including racial slurs written across the doors of Westside Hall and bananas left outside rooms in Winchester Hall. .

Cooper said she recognizes that more conversations like this need to happen in college, and she hopes diverse groups of people will start showing up, not just the same faces every time.

Cooper also said she enjoyed seeing people at the event. “Just seeing people come in, really getting into ‘I’ statements, sharing so many diverse perspectives, I think it was really empowering about what our community can take on.”

“Ideally, this event would be too big to have in this room when we have a student population of 5,000,” Cooper said.

Gomez explained how the event came about. In a meeting the USGA had with Dean of Students Ophelie Rowe Allen, they discussed creating spaces for conversations to be more proactive rather than reactive.

“I feel like I saw a lot of different faces today, and people got to speak up like I’ve never heard of before,” Gomez said. “So that was definitely a different perspective.”

Gomez said topics for future forums have yet to be announced, as they will choose them about one to two weeks in advance to maintain relevance.

For those who wish to deepen the discussion with the university community, additional sessions of this open forum series will be held on the last Thursday of March and April, in Room 307 of the Bergami Center Auditorium at 8 p.m.

“These conversations can take place on the last Thursdays [of the month]but they can arise at any time, and they can continue and grow,” Cooper said.