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4th Quarter Project - Hostile Architecture

  My group did a project about hostile architecture. Within our group, Emily and I tackled the issue of spreading awareness about hostile architecture while Zahraa and Luca wrote a proposal advocating for the installation of five new inclusive benches to go around Uni. To try to help spread awareness, Emily and I made flyers to put around campus on or near hostile architecture, on which are QR codes that link to a Google Doc we made with more information about what hostile architecture is, how it is harmful, and links to the flyers so that others can print them and put them up themselves if they so desire. Our project was initially going to be a proposal to the city of Champaign advocating for us to become part of Built for Zero, but we found that they are currently not taking new members and switched project topics.  I am happy that this project may result in a change being made around Uni in the name of inclusivity that could improve the day-to-day lives of Uni students. I t...
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Indigenous Housing Injustice

                 Within the United States, indigenous people struggle to acquire adequate housing due to poverty (the result of colonization and sustained oppression of indigenous peoples) and lack of government initiative to improve indigenous peoples’ qualities of living. Indigenous Americans have the lowest labor force rate of any racial group in the U.S. at just 61.1 percent, and the average income of those who do work is only $35,000 per year, compared to the national average of $50,000 per year. In the most impoverished indigenous communities, unemployment rates reach up to 85 percent and only 1 in 3 men have full-time, year-round jobs. Additionally, due to the geographic isolation of indigenous reservations, there are far fewer job opportunities than are available elsewhere. Overall, 1 in 4 single-race indigenous people (meaning those who exclusively racially identify as indigenous) lives in poverty. Homelessness is also a huge pr...
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Anti-Trans Laws and Child Welfare

               Recently, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued a directive encouraging the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families and medical professionals allowing transgender minors to medically transition for child abuse. Though this directive has not become law, it goes only a step further than a bill that was passed into law in Arkansas last year banning gender-affirming healthcare for those under 18 years old (including puberty blockers, which is a completely reversible form of treatment). Additionally, in the last year, there have been tons of bills introduced with the aim to limit trans students’ participation on sports teams that align with their gender identities, some of which have been passed into law. 2021 broke the record for the number of anti-trans laws introduced in one year, but it was not the first wave of anti-trans laws we have lived through. Several years ago, there was a wave of...
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Stop Line 3

  Content warning: mention of s*xual *ss*ult. You may have heard of the Stop Line 3 movement, an indigenous-led movement in protest of the construction of Canadian oil company Enbridge’s new tar sands pipeline. However, with lack of news coverage, information about the detrimental effects of Line 3 and about the Stop Line 3 movement in general requires some digging to find. Thus, I wanted this first blog post to be a summary of these issues and introduce the ways in which the construction of this pipeline is not only harmful to the environment, but a human rights issue and another dangerous affront to the welfare and sovereignty of indigenous people.             First of all, what is Line 3? In brief, Line 3 is the reconstruction of a pre-existing oil pipeline on a new route (as the old Line 3 was beginning to decay and become a hazard, and, of course, the efficiency of a new pipeline on this other route would generate more...
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