The Social Justice Post

January 24th, 2013 • Uncategorized

I have been asked who is the more socially progressive candidate of all these races. For me, I think the most interesting race for me to analyse is the AMS Presidential race.
In terms of community health and anti-oppression, we do not have a good representative warrior in any of the presidential candidates, though Ekat has proven to have more of a vision on equity facilitation and political representation. All of them seriously have a lot to learn about students’ needs for not just crisis services, but also a learning environment of social justice and equity.

Being the Executive Coordinator of Student Services, Jay Shah advocated for the needs of AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC), but garnered little attention from student groups that are ideologically in support of services for under-served people, such as the politically autonomous AMS Social Justice Centre (SJC) who endorsed candidates in other races.

*EDIT* Volunteers of AMS Services at the Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) cannot endorse any AMS executive candidates, as per Manager of SASC. This is a SASC rule. In the past, individual volunteers have endorsed candidates and AMS Elections has had approved such endorsements.

As for AMS Presidential candidate Caroline Wong, she has proven to make the effort to work with Womyn’s Centre Coordinator Jannel Robertson and Emily Plommer, providing the interim arrangement of allowing a person to stay at the Womyn’s Centre for an additional two weeks, after AMS officially declared that the the AMS Womyn’s Centre cannot operate as a crisis shelter.

As for AMS Presidential candidate Ekateryna Baranovskaya, she is the only one to put Equity right onto her platform. In an interview with Ekat, she said “I want to take a look back at the study done a few years ago on the AMS and equity, and move forward with a broad equity-training initiative that we can use to train student politicians.” The study she was talking about pointed to all the structural barriers to diverse representation and participation in AMS Council.

Finally, a professional articulation of the fact that being involved in student politics require you to feel that you would be respected as a human being among your future colleagues. Also, being involved with or even just blogging about student politics can be difficult when you face the barriers of being preoccupied with the physical insecurity, financial insecurity and housing insecurity you may potentially face in daily interactions due to the prejudice in our larger society.

AMS Resource Group PrideUBC is in the middle of negotiation with AMS about multi-stall multi-gender washrooms in the new SUB.

Unless they have sealed the deal with the New SUB Community Engagement Coordinator and VP Admin candidate Derek Moore, one would think that PrideUBC would have a lot more business to attend these AMS debates or ask the AMS Exec candidates to publicize their support for multi-gender washrooms in the new SUB. PrideUBC continues to remain politically neutral and not endorse any candidates in the AMS Elections.

AMS Resource Groups “are run by students and aim to support, protect, and celebrate the different backgrounds and beliefs of its membership.” AMS Council has long been unwilling to work with the Resource Groups due to the perceived nature of their political extremism and perceived difficulty to work with. However, there is NOTHING extremist about support for people of any sexual identity and gender identity (PrideUBC), sex and gender (Womyn’s Centre). These are grounds of discrimination outlined by and protected by the AMS Discrimination and Harassment Policy, which was revised in 2012. Considering 133 (6%) of the 2444 respondents who responded to the AMS Academic Experience Report in 2012 “feel, or have been made to feel, uncomfortable on campus due to [their] gender,” school climate is something that needs to be addressed and AMS needs to invest and collaborate with Resource Groups to provide a higher quality of anti-oppression cultural awareness.

If PrideUBC or any resource group feels that it is more of a safe haven and social centre, as opposed to a political interest group, then I strongly feel that such resource groups should leave the AMS Resource Groups structure and exist separately, with AMS funding. For example, as Pride UBC and the Womyn’s Centre are dealing with potentially vulnerable populations, they should consider what the benefits and disadvantages are of existing separately with continual annual funding from AMS. I would like to see AMS Councilors sit down with these two groups and assess if there is a way for these two groups to receive more than what they already receive, on the condition that they can work with Speakeasy to provide a comprehensively anti-oppression and compassionately educational (to people who may make genuine mistakes over ignorant expressions) peer support service. I strongly believe it would be beneficial to all parties involved, as they would all have to work together on an intersectional and caring way to provide peer support and social events, and improve UBC community health. I see this plan as a great opportunity for peer support to become a campus project that would renew its appeal to students involved with the UBC Equity Ambassadors Program, the GRSJ Student Association, the Wellness Centre (particularly the STOP HIV/AIDS team), Global Queer Research Group at the Liu Institute and the UBC Anti-Discrimination Response Training (ART) Facilitators.

What we absolutely need are standards of peer support, among these three groups, and the funding for PrideUBC and the Womyn’s Centre to have their individual offices, their own source of AMS funding and their individual relationships with AMS Council. This is because these three groups are not political interest groups but, rather, peer support groups that may work with AMS for advocacy (ie. PrideUBC working with the AMS VP Academic and University Relations on having UBC provide multi-stall multi-gender washrooms in University buildings.)

 

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