About the Project

Ways to Get Involved

Want to learn more about what we do? Join our newsletter, which will provide you with regular updates and info on how to participate in some of our initiatives.

Share your work

  • Are you part of a strike, protest, open letter, or other action on your campus that you’d like us to circulate? Email us with a link and a one-sentence description and we’ll add share it in our next newsletter.
  • Do you want to contribute a short creative piece, interview, project profile, artwork, or other content to our newsletter? Email us your piece or a short description of what you want to do.
  • Are you part of a data-collection project focused on resisting exploitation and health risks on college campuses? We’d love to add your project to our Resources page, and we’re always interested in finding ways to collaborate. Email us!

Join the team

  • Do you have time and energy and want to get involved in our project team? We’re always happy to get help collecting data, building resources, developing our website, conducting outreach, and editing the newsletter. Email us and tell us what you’re interested in doing.

Contact

  • email: visionaryfuturescollective@gmail.com

Project Principles

Purpose

  • To build solidarity across institutions of higher education in the United States in order to enable collective resistance to campus actions that put our communities at risk.
  • To help university workers redirect their anxieties towards collective action.
  • To bring visibility to the scale and distribution of COVID-relating events on campuses across the country, and to its potential impact.
  • To bring visibility to stories about the intersections of COVID and higher education that have been silenced or underrepresented.
  • To provide access to resources and strategies for resisting COVID policies on campuses.

People-First Data Collection

We are inspired by the work of Professor Kim Gallon and #COVIDBlack, a rapid response task force & a critical Black DH Collective that connects Black Diasporic communities impacted by the pandemic to their data. We follow the lead of that group, which writes, “we focus on the ways in which digital tools and technology can be used to not only collect data, but to facilitate collaboration, creation, and community through the collection of information and discourse which highlights the lived experiences of Black people during and beyond the COVID-19 outbreak.”

We believe that data collection projects are valuable only to the extent to which they support the emotional, physical, and professional well-being of project participants as well as the well-being of the communities we belong to and are committed to serving. Transparency We believe that making processes, systems, and patterns visible can empower people to take transformative action for themselves and their communities. We use data visualization to make visible that which has been hidden in plain sight as well as that which has been silenced or elided from public discourse.

We aim to bring this same premise of transparency to our own practices as a community. We use Slack, Google Drive, and Google Groups for communication and documentation. While not every individual will be involved in every process (not everyone has time for that!) we aim to make each process visible and allow community members to choose their level of participation with full understanding of the group and its activities.

Community

We do this work for and with:

  • University and college students and employees of all kinds, including custodial staff, maintenance workers, instructors, researchers, administrators, librarians, student workers, and all contingent or precariously-employed workers.
  • Students and employees at all non-profit institutions of higher education, including community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research institutions, and tribal colleges.
  • Populations within our academic community that are vulnerable to particular discrimination, exploitation, or coronavirus risk, specifically those who are first-generation; those who are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous; those who are immigrants; those who are on contingent or precarious contracts; and those who have disabilities.

Credit & Compensation

  • This is volunteer work. At this point, there is no financial compensation.

  • Anyone who wants their participation to be made public has the right to have their name included on the website and anywhere else that credit is given. Being a named member of the group is optional, and we will make clear that some members are anonymous. We will not rank members.

  • Any work published by or about this group should be credited to the individual authors ‘with the Visionary Futures Collective’.

Statement on Data Use & Re-use

Our project’s data collection practices are informed by ethical concerns about the creation and re-use of such materials. Presently we have been prioritizing information that has been confirmed, documented, or disseminated by news media outlets or public-facing university statements. While we acknowledge the value and importance of conversations happening on social media related to COVID-19’s impact on college campuses (and often participate in these conversations ourselves), we do not want to place individuals at personal or professional risk by aggregating and amplifying statements critical of employers, government officials, or other figures of authority.

Our approaches to data draw on the work of Documenting The Now and archivists and librarians who are taking concrete actions to center the lives and values of individuals and communities over investments in the historical value of social media content. If you are someone interested in collaborating with the project and you are similarly invested in these approaches, we would be happy to talk with you about ways of expanding or revising our approaches to data.

Project Team

  • Alex Galarza
  • Alex Wermer-Colan
  • Amanda Henrichs
  • Brandon Walsh
  • Brian DeGrazia
  • Brian Rosenblum
  • Chesya Burke
  • Claire Chenette
  • Dhanashree Thorat
  • Dawn Kaczmar
  • Elizabeth Grumbach
  • Geoffrey Way
  • Hadassah St Hubert
  • Hannah Alpert-Abrams
  • Jim McGrath
  • Matthew Hannah
  • Mimi Winick
  • Quinn Dombrowski
  • Saronik Bosu
  • Saul Alpert-Abrams
  • Sylvia Fernandez