Reflecting on year 1 of Logic School
A conversation between Dorothy Santos and Xiaowei Wang
Xiaowei Wang
Something that’s come up in Logic School is, how to get started. Most of us recognize that there is so much change to be made in the world. Some folks want to fight against or dismantle the current, dominant system or mitigate its harms, and others are intent on building something entirely new. It can feel overwhelming in terms of how and where to get started.
Dorothy Santos
I do believe that either one is equally difficult to do, fighting or building — it actually doesn't matter. I think what matters when making that distinction, it depends on history and lineage. When I say history and lineage, I'm talking about understanding the mechanisms of how something worked before you or I got there. Understanding lineage takes a lot of time. It also takes a lot of active listening to people who have experienced this. Sometimes that's an issue.
In teaching, I've encountered students that think that what they're making is new. My job as a teacher is to listen and say, ‘You know, that was done 20 years ago by such and such,’ and it's not because I want to burst their bubble. It's actually to say, ‘Did you look at this, did you know this?’, in order to get them to understand the vast history and previous work they are building on. I'm finding, as I age and mature, that fighting and building can be confusing because they kind of look like each other. Conflict happens in both realms. When you're fighting for something or when you're building something, consensus driven approaches and consensus driven work is actually very hard.
I'm curious how you feel now that you've facilitated and birthed into existence the first iteration of Logic School. How have your ideas of fighting against the system versus birthing a new one showed up for you and how have they changed?
Xiaowei
One of the many reasons why I asked you to come and be a mentor and advisor, not only to the Logic School cohort but also to me, was because I feel like one of the things that you do super well is cultivating an ecosystem. It points to your role as a teacher. I went into Logic School with the belief that we need a multiple of strategies and approaches — whether that’s mapping history, understanding how we got here, mitigating existing harms or building new platforms and tools. It’s crucial to have an ecosystem and not just a monoculture.
This is related to some of our other conversations on transformative justice that one of our guest lecturers, Anooj Bhandari brought in, and its challenge of our conventions around “holding people accountable” and instead, emphasizing the need for cultivating spaces where people can take accountability for themselves, with ease. Building spaces that can hold conflict and harm. That to me is a thriving ecosystem, one based in relationships. That’s the joy of experimental, community driven education spaces — it’s about giving the space for people to explore and not be prescriptive. For many of us, open spaces like that are incredibly rare. If you're lucky, you get a teacher or mentor or manager like you, Dorothy. But a lot of the time you're not so lucky. At work, it's all about measuring up to a certain performance or a certain standard. We need more spaces where you can not only explore new things intellectually or through making, but also engage the emotions and the embodied — whether that's processing your emotions as a tech worker through making art like Karen’s final project, advocating for neurodivergent folks at work like Cassie’s website, organizing with your union and sharing those findings like N’s work, or creating a new platform to celebrate neighborhood history and counter gentrification like Adrian’s work.
Dorothy
The more entrenched I've become into these different spaces I’ve realized much learning I have to do, and that learning will never stop.
The reason why I'm stating the obvious is that I’ve noticed a significant difference between myself and someone who, you know, is power hungry. This opens up conversation around how people take the power that has been afforded to them. I know that I'm touching upon something that's very multifaceted and contentious for a lot of different people but in regards to being a leader or teacher and having power, when you are scared and fearful and anxious, you're probably the right person to have that power. Because the minute you stop being fearful, the minute you don't care, you should probably pass the baton to someone else. A few years ago, during a conversation with a friend, he said, ‘I just feel like I'm getting bored at my job.’ And I said, ‘You need to give up teaching then.’ Because if you are not curious and you are bored, that is something that your students can easily pick up on. Some of the biggest lessons I've learned this past year have come from my willingness to listen to my students. Even if you disagree with your students or with your colleagues or collaborators, you take the time to understand the perspective that differs from your own. You have to check in with yourself about what kind of experience you have around the topic, because it's probably related to the way your parents raised you, it's probably associated with your own fears and insecurities. Those are really tough and sensitive issues that you can't always express. That's the issue with having a corporate job — it’s uncommon to go to your manager and say, ‘I want to talk about my feelings and how my income makes me feel like I can't support my mom or support my siblings or my kids.’I never had those kinds of conversations when I worked in biotech.
And I think a lot of people — you need to make a certain amount of money and have a particular amount of resources, not just for yourself, but if you have children, or if you have an aging, sick parent. Many people want to be or are anti-capitalist, but at the same time there needs to be nuanced conversation around how people can engage in a system that doesn't serve them. This is going to be very contentious for some people, but having the conversation at a theoretical or abstract level of whether one can be anti-capitalist or not, has its own privilege. My mom did not have that conversation with anyone when she was a 26-year-old immigrant mother in San Francisco with no friends and family, other than me and my dad to support her. I guess, what I’m trying to say is that you have got to know exactly what you’re setting on fire, literally and figuratively.
Xiaowei
As executive director at Processing Foundation, I see you all making open source tech, making these alternatives to corporate educational or edtech tools, so that students don't have to use closed platforms to be in the software space. There's a real groundedness to that. I love that groundedness and it’s central to both Logic School and how I imagine educational spaces. So much of my education was not centered in grounded experiences and I definitely resonate with what you describe — it’s like you’re expected to leave your experiences and where you come from at the door in favor of learning the abstract. As we began to put together Logic School, one thing we discussed was how to make a space that is grounded in people’s experiences, and not just the abstract. It reminds me of what Yasmine brings up in her interview on organizing seeds, and what Derrick talks about in his final project, on actual day-to-day conversations and questions you can bring up.
Dorothy
This makes me think of the orality versus text conversation that has been brought up. This is a topic that has come up in conversation within multiple academic circles and across different disciplines, the topic of citationality. I participated in a workshop recently and one of the presenters said was working on a story about where she's from and what happens when nature collides with the built environment and how animals can affect connectivity. She was doing a story on her hometown — they lost internet connection for a day or two because a monkey was chewing at the cable wires .
The reason I'm bringing this up is that one of the things she said when someone asked her, ‘Who is the source for your story?’ She responded, ‘I am the source. This happened in my own home, with my family.’ What I'm trying to say is, in the Western world, oral tradition is not necessarily a thing . You can say that it’s becoming a thing because there's an emergence of podcasts and sound-based media. The reason why I'm connecting it back to orality versus text is because, we see this in academia, you're more credible if you have however many peer-reviewed articles under your name. The irony is that no one is necessarily reading those articles other than academics.
Xiaowei
I think about this a lot from the magazine side of things. One thing that people don't think of is the power and privilege inherent in journalistic training; it privileges a certain kind of knowledge. It's this very specific form of knowing the world. I don’t mean this in the conspiratorial way, but there are dominant outlets where it's plugged into a journalistic industry that’s also a very hierarchical structure — reporter versus subject, the written word versus other forms of knowing. I was talking to a friend who graduated from an MFA writing program and he's still writing, but his day job is a radical librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system. And he was saying that so much of what he learned as part of writing, it can be really prescriptive, they just churn you out.
Dorothy
In my own creative practice, I found that I didn't want something so antiseptic. Having done podcasting briefly, I kept thinking to myself — I mean, this is also related to what Ox Delgadillo is doing. One of the things I loved about his work is that there's such a magic in being in a place where you can hear the environment of the person you're talking to. For me, this is why orality versus text is important. I think this is a reason why a lot of people listen to podcasts, because they want to hear — sometimes it's hearing something and believing it with all your senses. That's the reason why fighting for something you believe in, organizing, community building, teaching, all of these very embodied experiences, they can be simultaneously difficult and challenging but also enthralling and exciting. That's the thing I realized about the participants at Logic School — there was something about listening to all their final projects and thinking, you're really alive. People feel enlivened and emboldened when they feel that they need to encounter or confront a crisis. I think that's an important part of what Logic School did for the participants, and for me.
Xiaowei
One of the things that feels important to think about is how in organizing work, there's always a strong sense of history. I was rereading adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy, where she has all these interviews with other organizers and talks about how Grace Lee Boggs was her mentor. There's this beautiful thing about talking to your elders or just recognizing the work that has come before. I remember in one of the first sessions at Logic School, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition saying that abolition is a multigenerational project. It makes you really step back. Those stories that feel closer to me now, especially after the first year of Logic School, are the ones that are related to lineage, to talking to elders, because it makes you remember and realize — ten years ago, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, there was and is violence and suffering. So what are the direct ways we make change in our present? You always ask, “What do you do, from where you’re at, with what you’ve got?” Framed that way, there’s so much to do. That feels super important and is something that I learned from Logic School.
Dorothy
I learned a lot, not just about organizing but about what it means to have your values and your ideology match with how you are politically and organizationally. I used to do community organizing and those distinctions of ideology, political, and organizational lines, those are all things people constantly have to juggle. If there's anything that I learned from Logic School and the way the participants and the students approach not just the topics and the themes but their projects, it showed me how important the arts are. I think people forget that the way to solve problems is through a creative approach. Whether it was a zine, a game, a podcast, an artistic work, etc.
Xiaowei
There's so many ways that the connection between art and activism is really overlooked. So much goes into like, how are we going to operationalize this? How are we going to get a max number of signups, signatures, and things like that, which are all really important and yet we can’t forget the role of culture, vision and imagination. I don’t mean that in a politics of empathy way, but in the sense that vision and imagination is something artists are incredibly good at. Someone who inspires me is Mother Cyborg, Diane Nucera, of the Detroit Community Technology Project. To paraphrase her, in a recent talk she remarked how artists and activists are really at the forefront, imagining and pushing for change, with policy eventually catching up.
Dorothy
Another thing that I learned at Logic School is that I don't have to do the work that I want to do by myself. I think that is the value of being in community or being a part of a cohort. Yes, you differ from one another, and you have these different lived experiences, but those inform how you evolve. I could see that through the final projects. I felt that Logic School really showed me that people had the capacity to be there for one another, intellectually and emotionally and psychologically, through the work.
Xiaowei
That's the power of having art as part of the space. With art, or any creative approach, where you can make a zine like Holly, Emily or Yindi did, you can make these tarot cards like Nitya, you can make a club to internally organize like Gabe was, you can build new platforms for your community and neighborhood like Willy and Adrian. You're no longer writing fan mail to power. You are actually in that conversation and changing people's perceptions of their environment, denaturalizing structures of power, reminding people of their power. You are building life affirming infrastructures, creating those underlying conditions for possibility and spaciousness.