So today I'd like to welcome Brian Jordan Jefferson for our fourth lips of the semester. Brian is an associate professor of geography and geographic information sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the editorial, he's on the editorial board of Urban Geography and a review and open site editor of society and space.org. His book, Digitize and Punish, Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age, will be published this spring by the Minnesota University Press. So with that let's warmly welcome Professor Jefferson. Thanks, Lentree, and thanks for all your organizing efforts. And it's really good to be back here because this project really started here, I was telling him earlier at the Hungarian pastry shop, a lot of it was originally conceived. And the project, or this is really the fifth chapter to my book, and what it's really looking at is sort of how carceral governance is extending but through the smart city form. And a lot of the things that were going on when I was here were the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative and at the time Bloomberg was talking about having more cameras in New York City than London and it originally was for warrant error efforts but it sort of mutated into criminal justice. So one of the things I sort of wanted to start with is movie to sort of give a visualization and I think I hope this works of what I'm looking at. No spewing that Shenzhen has become one of the most important places in the world of tech. Nowhere else has quite as potent recombination of tech know-how, cheap manufacturing costs, and sheer speed. But it goes further than that. Living in Shenzhen is in many ways like living in the future. Not necessarily a utopian future. Or like the other kind. Trying to jaywalk in certain parts of Shenzhen and the government's spatial recognition will spot you. It was even a board of shame showing the faces of recent offenders. Shenzhen is the same ambitious plan created only present in video surveillance. The Shui Yan or sharp eyes project aims to extend and integrate video surveillance. It aims to use artificial intelligence, speed data and deep learning to analyze this mountain of video evidence to work out who's doing what, where and when to track suspects and the people they associate with and even to predict crime. Improving lives, increasing connectivity across the world. That's the great promise offered by data-driven technology. But in Shenzhen it also promises greater state control and abuse of power. Well good afternoon everyone, I guess it is afternoon. We're here at the Lowell Manhattan Security Command Center, our city's state of the art anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism coordination center. And as you know it is staffed jointly by NYPD officers and security representatives from the private sector. We also use open search areas, this public databases that are out there that we utilize. We use Google right up to any type of web page that's necessary to target our internal data. Link analysis we utilize again to see the associations and the connectivity of exactly how these people that are involved in the incident may be associated and this way get closer to solving the crime. So I want to give you a demonstration of being one of the police domain awareness systems which is an application that was jointly developed by police officers, New York City Police Department and representatives from Microsoft. We would hand out all cameras within 500 feet of the 9-1-1 call. Those cameras would populate on the screen here. We would hand them out to our data. They would say, you know the time you work with what they're planning to do on it. And so... At the rear of the pier is on a monitor. Sometimes it's captured on camera. A camera that can follow a bad guy trying to get away. The runtime for crime center is a chance for the police department to partner with the community to find new ways to keep our city safe. Analysts data, looking to slow the data in attempt to be able to predict where crimes will occur in the future. Looking for patterns that may cross precinct boundaries and monitoring all the cameras. Can the new strategic decision support Chicago? Are you going to monitor developments and gain conflicts in real-time? The built-in back ends are right there on the user interface. It makes it nice that I don't have to drag stuff out and open stuff up. I open it all up in my own stomach. And I realize that that way... In both having an officer on every corner, which is impossible for any police department, we're able to use technology as a force multiple times so that we can be in the places that we can't physically be in and see things we couldn't see and know what we couldn't know. And to be able to use all the different types of technology to get there in order to provide a safer period for our residents. It's definitely going to have an impact on the decrease in our crime rate. Here's some hangout locations for it. Here's the possible side. Then we're going to have to sit down. If we just sit down, I don't know what else to hope. Being able to adapt the technology to conflicts, practices... And we're going to put two hands together. We're going to say two hands at the same time. ...that will enhance officer safety. In a terrorist sense, you might be worried about things, right? But in general... I think one has half a million cameras and we're just getting started. So, I want to open up with that because you read a lot of the times that, oh my God, China is this authoritarian regime and it has this big sort of surveillance apparatus. But it comes from here a lot. A social credit system which looks at people that are risks. It comes from Wall Street. It was originally a financial instrument. The Ring of Steel, the cameras originally... Well, that's from London in many ways. And having those cameras, thousands of cameras feeding to central locations comes from Western democracies. They're inventions of Western democracies. And they've been used in many ways to surveil differentially minority populations. I had another video about the Uighurs. And another I think really ironic thing is the first video of the guy saying, Shenzhen, oh my God, it's a technological dystopia. It was Bloomsburg magazine. But if you go back 12 years, it was Bloomsburg who originally introduced one of these surveillance systems, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. So what I'm really looking at... And this is something that came to me sort of towards the end. I wish I would have thought about it more earlier. But this surveillance apparatus comes out of Western democracies. And I want to argue a little bit. It comes out and it's fueled by... I'll talk a little bit about the IT sector, at least in the U.S. context. So the title of the talk, How to Program a Carceral City, is what it's looking at is how cities, how the architecture of the Internet of Things is designed to help identify and capture undesirable people. But in many ways, that's... We have the U.S. Department for it. So the main thesis of the book is that this is the carceral system. This is the carceral state. The diagram where you have prisons, courts, and police, usually if you study criminology or criminal justice, is I think antiquated or becoming antiquated. And it's better to think about it as a database network. And one of the things that I'm looking at is sort of how the carceral apparatus is morphing or transforming through the database networks. And for my chapter five, the implications for the smart city. So if we think of the smart city, we think of how is it changing relations? How is it changing the way people navigate space? Or don't navigate space? I use a lot of the Fed. How does it change the way we conceptualize urban space? And then, of course, spatial practices between people, between the government and citizens. So the story for my research is like a lot of different books on mass incarceration. Ruthie Gilmore probably has the most famous one. William Julius Wilson also did a lot of work on this.  But it starts with the industrial city, or the breakdown of the industrial city. So if we think about mass incarceration in this country, we have to think about it in relation to urban political economy, at least to some extent. And if you allow me a broad generalization, we know during the high point of industrial urbanization, large parts of cities are essentially factories for industrial capital. And it brought with it its own transformations in urban space, whether you talk about pollution or the destruction of the natural environment. Transformations in social relations, urban populations start to expand rapidly, and you get a whole host of social and political struggle, whether that's union struggles or whether it's political struggles during the high point of, you might say, McCarthyism or something like this. But also technological relations change, or human technological relations start to change. Of course, as we get into the high point of industrialization, so one of the things we'll look at is sort of how people are, of course, becoming sort of expendable, vis-a-vis factory machines and the like. But also when we talk about the industrial city, it's important to think of how capital influenced urban policy, which of course influenced social relations, which of course influenced the evolution of urban space itself. So we can think of Pacific Mills of factories, we can think of General Electric with electrification and the extension of the workday, auto factories. But one of the things I was really interested in looking at was what would become telecommunications industries. So the computing reporting tabulation company, which is essentially, it went on to become IBM. Of course sold electromechanical tabulators to take censuses, which was very important in the early 1900s. And it wasn't only important just to keep tabs on the size of the population, but at the time differentiating white ethnics was very important because of the nativist politics, of course, and the anti-immigrant sentiments. And so one of the things I sort of look at is if we get one of those old tabulation cards, I'll sort of put a picture of one of the tabulation cards and the way that they differentiate, it was black, then you had about 10 different European nationalities slash ethnicities. There's no Asian, typically on these cards, no Latin American either. But it was a very important technology to be able to differentiate and keep tabs on different subgroups. And all of these companies you can say are, you know, interests sort of shaped the way that urban space evolved during that time.  Now, deindustrialization, there's a ton of literature on it, of course, in relation to mass incarceration. One way we can think of it, I think it's sort of neat and tidy ways through David Harvey's spatial fix, right? So you get capital and it comes into a city, it finds a workforce, it exploits the workforce, then it finds greener pastures. Maybe in rural America, maybe in the suburbs, and then eventually in newly industrializing countries, primarily outside of the U.S. And you might think about the way that space and the organization of populations evolves during the industrial period is through the enclosure, right? We can think about Foucault or DeLuz, and they talk about the enclosures. And one of the ways you deal with a mass of unemployed, ethnically and racially undesirable people is through prisons, right? Prisons mirror factories in many ways. But if we look at sort of the racial dimension of mass incarceration in relation to an economic transformation, we can go to the 1930s, you get the Great Depression, the gray line is unemployment, it heats up over 25%. The black line is new prisoners. And you do get a little, a modest increase in prison entries during the 30s. But if we go to 1980, and we look at new prisoners, it explodes by 300% over the decade. And in relation to, this would essentially be deindustrialization, prisoners in the high 70s that come from industrial cities. Now the question might be, well, why is there not such a tremendous spike in new prisoners during the Great Depression as compared to during the high point of deindustrialization? Well, we could ask the same question, why is there not a huge spike in imprisonment in rural America, right? Right now. Because a lot of de-unemployment in rural and middle America is coming from de-industrialization, but their unemployment is not understood as a crime, it's not understood as deviance. You might argue that when we look at rural or white unemployment that comes from de-industrialization, people start to become really good sociologists, and they start to talk about things like globalization, right? Now when it happens, of course, in the 80s, there's a whole different discourse.  And I think you can say the same thing for the 30s. So the way that we respond to mass unemployment, of course, is different depending on who's unemployed or underemployed, of course. And so if you are into the literature on mass incarceration, there's a general consensus that the prison is one of the mechanisms used to manage mass employment of disproportionately black and Latinx people. So just to further drive home the point of the social dimensions of carceral governance or mass criminalization, this is taken from the sentencing project in 2006. So these data, they're from 2006, but they're still, I think, startling. So in 2006, the average man, one in nine would be incarcerated in this country, which I think is insane. White men, one in 17, which is still, if you look anywhere else in the world, that's pretty insane as well. And black men is one in three, that's unfathomable. Latino men, one in six, unfathomable. Black women, one in 18, more black women are incarcerated in the U.S. than any male population anywhere in any developed western country. You could just say black women alone. And they are actually the fastest increasing subgroup of new prisoners right now. But you could look at Latino women, one in five white women, one in 111,000. So the point is if we go back to sort of deindustrialization, we have to think of, okay, factories Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, they're disproportionately black and Latino. And we get, this is sort of one of the ways that the state responded to the problem. The shrinking of the welfare state, the expansion of the penal state. And if we go back to the video and think of China, if we sort of try to be aliens and decontextualize ourselves from wherever we're from and just look at the data or look at the trends, it's very similar. Perhaps it's a precedent in many ways for thinking about dealing with them desirables. And it's not new of course, putting people in camps or in storage. But it definitely, the U.S. has contributed to that history. So these would be the social dimensions of carceral governments, right? Of course it's heavily racialized. Now, this was from here, and now I've learned that layer probably crunch these data. But this was the million dollar black project. And I said earlier, it was really important for the way that I conceptualized thinking about carceral city. So dark red is prison spending for black in New York City. As you might imagine, the overwhelming impoverished black and Latino areas. And then this is sort of the prisoner or prisoner to take up in the city out into rural prisons. And we know there's a recidivist feedback loop of going to and from the city to rural prisons. And there's a whole lot of literature on the political economy of rural prison industries, right? You get communities that are dependent economically on prison development. You get Walmart's hotels, restaurants, right? That becomes sort of dependent on the presence of prisons, which of course feeds back into policy lobbying, policy for harsher criminal justice policies. Now what I wanted to know is in looking at this and thinking about carceral government is more like a geographer. What is the socio-technical architecture or maybe I shouldn't use that word here. What is the socio-technical sort of substrate that accompanies this, right? And I got that idea by this quote from Ruthie Gilmore and Craig Gilmore. And they said, the state's management of racial categories is analogous to the management of highways or ports of telecommunication. Racist ideological and material practices are infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded and modernized periodically. My only issue with this quote is they used analogy and I just took out analogous. Well, of course in some cases it's analogous but we don't have to think of it as an analogy, right? The maintenance of racial categories has physical infrastructure. It needs physical infrastructure, right? Ways of segregating people, ways of supervising them, ways of containing them, right? Ways of surveilling them. It all requires some sort of infrastructure. So I think the question for us now especially those of us interested in decarceration and decriminalization politics and abolitionist politics is how is carceral, what does smart cities, what does the internet of things, change the geography of carceral governance, right? A total number of prisoners is at a 20-year low right now and that's no guarantee that it won't spike back up but that definitely seems like the trend partially just because of the amount of funding that it takes to incarcerate someone which is about depending what state you're in but in Illinois it's 25K a year so you can just put the person in college, right? 25K a year exceeds their market value, prisoners for the most part because if you look at some place like Chicago the average prisoner is living on around 10,000 a year so it's more expensive to incarcerate them and when we get the great recession you get a lot of city administrations going through their budgets and saying well wait a second this is really expensive, right? So there's one of the alternatives in New York State whether electronic ankle bracelets which of course are much cheaper but I'll get to that so my study is really sort of works towards looking at these issues during the smart city era and when I say smart city I'm thinking of two things, mostly the internet of things being sort of its infrastructural logic the internet of things being digital devices communicating with one another behind the scenes modifying processes whether it's energy provision or water provision right behind the scenes and of course it's used for everything from traffic to energy to home security and health care one of the things trains their schedules when they come can be automatically modified to account for changes in traffic that are observed by on the street so this type of stuff and the question is sort of well if we know that traffic has been adapted to IOT if we know that retail of course pretty much any major dimension of urban living has been adapted to IOT so has criminal justice provision and it's cheaper and in many ways more invasive mass incarceration and that's not to downplay mass incarceration because there are still about two million people incarcerated and that's not my intent but one way is to think of the infrastructural logic so in other words if we think of the industrial city as the factory and if we think of the prison as essentially that type of factory enclosure that's so common to the factory system and the way of thinking about organizing space that are tightly regulated then we can think of the internet the smart city through the internet of things at least to some extent through networks infrastructure networks where traffic is talking to energy provision is talking to security systems all behind the scenes so that's one of the sort of major things that I'm trying to think about as sort of a logic that is changing carceral governance the second is information capital which I take from Manuel Castells his network society but as an urban geographer so much of the work that looks at the way that city started to change in the 80s and the 90s focus understandably on finance of course how it focuses on the finance what is it called the financial coup in the city in the 80s and a lot of the great other great work focuses on real estate capital sometimes it is financial real estate capital but especially the work on gentrification is looking at the increased value of the properties and the ways that financial interest in real estate interest work in conjunction with city governments to try to find ways to kick out people who can't afford to live in a redeveloping city but I think one thing that's sort of a fraction of capital if you will that is not study that much information capital and some of it could be telecommunications or it could be software and I sort of put them under the umbrella of information capital IBM, Motorola, Oracle I would argue that they have as much influence over urban administration as pacific mills or Ford factories would have had 100 years of well maybe not 100 years I forget what year it is 100 years ago and the influence not only policy but they also influence social relations of course we're dependent more and more on this technology to live our social life and they're also shaping spatial relations the way that urban space is used the way that it's transforming in many cases so these are sort of the two things that I'm looking at urban is sort of adapted and mutated to the smart city through the internet of things and through IT interests so that's the question what happens when car sale government governance meets information capital and pretty much all of the stuff on mass incarceration focuses on industrial capital and they focus on the spatial fix they focus on factories leaving New York leaving Philadelphia leaving Detroit and sort of the vacuum that it leaves and the destitution that it leaves and that's part of Harvey's spatial fix capital leaves that finds greener pastures but there's another part I think that's a little bit neglected is that new fractions move in and again we've talked about finance and real estate but also IT so I the book looks at both New York City and Chicago but figured I'd do New York City the sort of story of the sort of smart car sale city begins it really begins post 9 11 and in 2005 the lower Manhattan security initiative the plan to first draw on the LMSI and this initiative was essentially we're going to put 3,000 cameras primarily around tourist areas and areas of financial importance and the idea is a lot of stuff is on facial recognition the cameras didn't necessarily have facial recognition but they had different technologies some would be able to identify objects such as a backpack that's left unintended there's also recognition software of your gates of how you walk which comes from Israel because the idea is you can spot a terrorist by how they walk they're also environmental sensors audio sensors etc and the basic idea is it an anomaly or something or something suspicious is detected by a camera it would automatically alert a command center but then it also automatically alerts the nearest patrol unit that's available to intercept or to observe what's going on so it's this game of sort of being able to almost warping urban space being able to capture identify or capture undesirable anomalous or suspicious behavior at a faster and faster clip and that's sort of the basic idea of the security initiative of course it draws on London's Ring of Steel one of the things that Bloomberg was intent on was beating British and having more cameras and after the LMSI was announced I think two years later there's the Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative which was just an extension of the original one and then we're getting up to 10,000 cameras according to reports but these are I don't know how those data are sort of it's difficult no one knows how many cameras are in any of these major cities but it also had different sensors one would be license plate meters on patrol vehicles but also mounted throughout the urban environment and again every bridge and tunnel that led into Manhattan was fitted with a security camera so it created sort of what I like to think of almost like a moat a 21st century moat or at least being able to detect who's coming in who's coming out the last article I read was 2016 and there were 17 billion scans or something in the database but it wasn't only license plate meters there were also audio sensors some were gunshot detections but others were looking for upticks of noise of crowd noise from people there were also environmental sensors radiation sensors and these types of things and again the idea was to have this network of machines that like one of the guys in the video said would be the eyes and ears where to multiply the eyes and ears of the police and again it starts off as a war on terror initiative it's related to counter-terrorism but it morphs into the NYPD's everyday policing of crime around 2012 so the domain awareness system is a piece of software created co-created by the NYPD and IBM and one of the central applications is called the crime warehouse and the idea here is that people who have criminal records become undesirable suspicious objects just in their mere presence and this is where the facial recognition the struggle becomes important because if the technology works it usually doesn't but it will eventually someday and you have to think of this picture of the images we saw in China but they would be here too facial scans being able to instantly identify people with criminal records and you can just imagine the implications of that but domain awareness sort of signifies the transformation of these they're called data fusion centers from national security to everyday criminal justice and that I think is the important thing and you have to think of it in relation to networks of cameras networks of sensors networks of patrol cars as well all being fed into centralized locations and machines having the ability to alert without human intervention but also humans of course using it to intervene without computers but the point is that I believe that there's an externalization of the carceral system so if the carceral system is predominantly in these three branches prisons, police, courts my argument is it's provading, it's spreading through the actual urban architecture the material space and at the core of it is this sort of power fantasy and I don't think that it's ever this efficient and that's always something that I think it's important to watch out for to say this is some totalizing completely efficient machine because it's not there of course still in efficiencies people don't always use the information there are misfires, there are mouth functions etc but the point is just thinking about the tendency and the horizon that this marriage between IOT and carceral governance portends so what I see is an externalization of the carceral state and just to look at a couple initiatives to come out of the Domain Awareness Center one was the mobility initiative and okay this was originally giving a lot to the officers mobile phones with their own specialized suite of applications they're originally Nokia phones and one of the women that were in video tish she's the director of the information technology bureau for the NYPD she got in hot water a while ago because they bought like $30 million worth of these phones but then the operating system was defunct and they weren't updating it so they had to fill them all out then they got asked but the important thing and that's where tax money is going that's another thing that I think is important about thinking about IT and one of the things I found on my project which I did not think are the billions and billions of dollars of tax monies that have gone into prototyping these technologies I also probably should have said the Domain Awareness system is a proprietary technology and it's sold all across the US but even outside of the US and New York City I think it's 30% of the other 70% right but we have to think of in terms of criminal justice and technology a lot of it what I found is total type by tax payers money in 2015 the Department of Homeland Security opened up its Silicon Valley office which essentially funds startups which tells them what they need and the startups develop it so that's something but in any event the mobility initiative of course it was a suite of apps for patrol officers and of course you could do things like search one sites et cetera and they can draw on databases whether they're in upstate New York the National Crime Information Center in West Virginia other fusion centers across the country they have instances of access and that's one thing but another thing that I'm interested in are forms and now officers prepare and transmit incident reports on the street and it's not a radical transformation but what I think it's doing is it's externalizing criminal processing onto the street and again I'm thinking of trends or tendencies so none of these things I think taking in isolation is that radical of a transformation but the bigger picture is that criminal booking is now done on the street it turns the police officer in many ways into a data processor which is ironic because in China that's what police do at ages of violence they more so are taking data they're recording data and that's what they're doing in the US but they have guns as well so that would be one the mobility initiative another would be electronic bracelets e-carceration sometimes it's called and this would be mostly for people on parole and probation and in 2000s when I say 7 or 8 it was right around the recession Upstate New York starts their ATI their alternative to e-carceration and they start using ankle bracelets and then in 2015 there was a big expose in the times about juveniles of migrants' prisons and I think it was good they were taken out of the prisons but they were getting ankle bracelets but the ankle bracelets are on one hand movements are traced movements are predicted but another interesting thing about ankle bracelets is they have what are called geofences I'm sure you guys are familiar with it but a geofences is essentially if you step across this latitude and alert will be sent to the nearest available patrol officer so again this externalization of being able to monitor and manage people's and again it's not as horrific as being in a prison but still you can sort of see a different horizon of carceral management coming into focus Another technology you might think of is Comstat Comstat 2.0 and 2.0 is when the NYPD put their crime database online now an interesting thing is you get a couple developments out of this one is network surveillance once every day citizens were able to enter data into the database or complaints via the website I argue that civilians started becoming sentinels of policing, of surveillance in some ways another thing is of course looking at the data of people who use these maps as we know to determine where they want to live where they want to travel where they want to eat and things like this increasingly so in many ways I think these online databases they sort of influence people to see like a police state so if you know seeing like a state I agree with that but this is seeing like a police state it's looking at people and some who have done of course vicious crimes but others who are drug criminals and it's keeping constant track of where they are where they're concentrated and I think it makes us think of the city is this place of even more partitioning where we want to go where it's desirable, where it's undesirable and it adjoins this the average civilian to participate in that visualization so one of the things that happens is the NYPD so much video footage and that's one of the most important things which they're very heavy data payloads, video and they ran out of storage so they signed a 25 year lease and they occupied three floors in the Verizon center and used their data storage so again you see this collaboration between telecommunications and the city and you can imagine I don't know a hand but almost at least probably cost it's over 20 years so there are three theses that come out of the work first that database networks are extending the war on crime and drugs and of course I'm sure we're all familiar with there's the one argument that we know of course this is just another iteration of using science or scientific discourse to normalize or to justify state violence state exclusion on differential administration of people which is an old story there's nothing new about that but that's part of the picture right now we don't even think about well should we really be using police force and monitoring and surveillance and the criminal justice system as the main mechanism to deal with urban poverty and urban marginalization and unemployment and underemployment that you know well if a machine says oh there's the bad guy then it sort of skirts that debate in many ways and you know one of the things that I found in the process of writing a book was this is in many ways more liberal invention that goes back to Lyndon Johnson law enforcement administration agency I think the technocratic solution because it's a sanitized way of doing something that often I think many liberals would jump on Reagan for doing massive criminalization mass incarceration if you look at after-furbishing there's a famous pamphlet it's an Obama task force that looks at it's called policing in the 21st century and essentially what it's saying is we have to look to the IT sector to help us deal with racial policing and for instance the cameras were one of the big solutions and if you know the politics of the cameras some of them it turned out they were using them not only for police civilian interactions but also for surveillance and Taser International which makes the cameras that the NROPE uses they're within less than a fiscal year their profits went up by 75% after and maybe it is better but I think to have the cameras but I think it's important to think about the underlying relations and also the underlying legacy of the law on crime and drugs second IT sector is really this extension I think it's pretty commonsensical if they want to sell cameras or software if they want to sell more so they'll never be lacking in a reason for a new technology to use to surveil or to manage crime third this IT carceral nexus is transforming geographies of carceral power and that's what I mean by an externalization of the carceral state and then lastly these developments pose new challenges and opportunities for abolitionist politics and another thing I met a child of Foucault in many ways so I always have to resist this urge of this sort of totalizing autonomous power that's unstoppable it's not unstoppable but it does pose new challenges and it also poses new opportunities in many ways to use the data against the state so if I have like a database of the Chicago police and it says that I think it was like 89% of all people arrested for vandalism it was something in the 90's 90's percentile people for gambling 75% of people for drug crimes are all black or Latino you don't really need to make an argument they've already made it for you it's not like black and latino people came together and said let's commit more crimes at some point it's a function of the policy and so I do think new opportunities for abolitionist politics are opening up through this sort of excessive documentation that never aligns on technology but to get that you'll have to buy the book in next spring thank you what is how important to be in the face of this seeing somebody in the eye but really by the time when it gets there they don't care if they're cool or not they've already been arrested there's an enormous imbalance in the technological capacities in the schools of data in higher obviously oh yeah so how can the types of community and profits and places where many pastors and attorneys do support technologies and processes were developed and funded by either funding for war or funding for criminal justice yeah well I think they are so in Chicago there's the mihente movement in the city San Francisco of course was the first city to abolish the facial recognition cameras and then shortly after that a city in Massachusetts I forgot its name did I think that was the question sort of how can we sort of intervene one way is I think how we think about data so like if the police say 90% of people who commit crime are black I have a quote from 2012 where the police commissioner said 60% of people commit crimes are Jewish I think there are precedents for people critiquing the use of science and data science and again I think that's like the least interesting part of my research the use of science from phrenology to statistical social science in the 1890s so if anyone really read Jabril Muhammad I forget it, Jabril Muhammad's book called The Condemnation of Blackness he looks at the history of how social science and social statistics were used in the late 1800s and early 1900s so I just think it's another chapter in the story of how science used to justify these types of policies and I think if people want to get interested looking at the history because when I first started out with the project I would say oh this new thing everything's new and then I started all the way in 1890 with the census tabulator machine which of course became IBM and it was the same story a lot, different target, different context but I would think not being so president not thinking in the present but thinking about how these things have been done throughout history and looking at how people in the past have dealt with it it's a good way to look at it but I don't think it will come from the academy though to be honest an abolitionist strategy I'm concerned that I feel in the way that some of the critiques that I'm seeing coming up of smart cities and the shifting politics of the progressive state is that using languages of disparity and inequity by focusing on the disproportionate ways that the effects of surveillance and criminalization fall on targeted populations specifically black and Latinx populations that may have this unintended effect of naturalizing the overall surveillance process and seeing like the only thing that's wrong with it is that it's disparate in its application so can you suggest any retort these strategies or ways of approaching it politically that any knowledge white supremacist formulas are in the ways that specific populations are targeted but also focus on the underlying surveillance architecture yeah, well I think it's an inherited word abolition it's abolishing the system of governance which does in general and of course it's connected to broader politics of surveillance but I guess I would come from the other direction and say one of the issues is when we talk about surveillance as if it's evenly spread often times and I do see that a lot in especially media studies which doesn't really have it doesn't why use racial capitalism and most of the stuff on race that I've read and you know I'm not in media studies but it's more about how people express their selves or how they're mixed recognized by an algorithm but for me I think the danger is thinking of this as an evenly spread out process and I think the way that smart cities or big data companies sort of people's relations to them are different so if you're middle class it might be stealing our private data which is a huge problem but it might not be cameras in our actual living space it's one of the things I should have put in that I left out public housing the domain awareness system was extended through public housing so I think it's a great point that we have to think of this as a system of governance that needs to be critiqued in its entirety but I also think it's important to not make false equivalences between the ways that some of the most marginalized people their relation to technology which is probably much different than our relation to technology in this room I feel hysteric when I see my leftist friends or abolitionist peers willingly using facial recognition on their phones for example and it feels to me sometimes just hopelessly ubiquitous like we're kind of all hitting our lives over and then there's a more optimistic part of me that doesn't make people just don't understand like the change toward the landscape as you were saying so I'm just wondering what you think about galvanizing the left and making this an issue that people are really motivated to use I think it's galvanizing itself they're seeing the electronic frontier foundation is big and I think there's a lot of anti-facial recognition politics that is sort of popping up on both coasts there's people are getting the ankle bracelet stuff I think it is sort of popping up throughout leftist politics using it in our personalize has a different story but I do think it is and again I try to think like both ways or dialectically about it of course it's new forms of power and surveillance are evolving new opportunities are evolving for networking for networking activist groups so I think it's important to not have a one-sided story be techno pessimists and sales bad it's this big totalitarian thing which it kind of is but it also has new opportunities I think for organizing and I do think that people just looking at news clips are starting to really catch on to it the thing though I think is it's so late that we catch on to it's so late in the book I show a lot of the stuff is originally proposed in the 80s and trickled out in the 90s and even if you look at something like Facebook it took us like 20 years to figure out what their business model was so I think like more people are becoming interested in the issue when they're doing digging and they're starting finding oh wait this is a problem bigger than we thought but I think it I think slowly it's happening yeah oh yeah yeah yeah I mean I don't have anything more sophisticated than saying they want to sell software and hardware the IT industry for me one of the more the interesting things about the political economy is how the state not only co-designs it also funds the development of a lot of these technologies as well but I mean I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that IBM if they could sell one package of domain awareness they'd want to sell two or three and I just think it's an old story of you don't want to mix economic incentive and incarceration a good person to look at this is W. E. B. Du Bois noticed this after slavery and he noticed this within convict lease system which was a system where you would have prisoners released out to industrial railroads, mining companies and what do you see? You see this rapid explosion of black prisoners so I think the real story is you don't want to mix economic incentive and incarceration or punishment it's like it's one of the most dangerous combinations you can have and that I guess was one I saw as maybe a task that the book was just to expose that link and I think a lot of people could do much more better empirical work on it than I did I remember one person she was asking well how much can you quantify the profits and I don't even know how to start to try to do that I try to expose the link and then hopefully it can be developed oh sorry yeah yeah yeah I would start with Neil Smith um his book with the gentrification frontier or stuff on the revengeous city um there's Louis Guacan who's a bit of a lightning rod but he does work on that stuff too in Chicago most gentrification David Wilson is in my department he wrote a book called Black on Black Inventing Black on Black Violence um but yeah I would start with this but yeah there is a lot of that stuff it was funny so one of the things I did for the book when I was doing research here was talking to grassroots groups and they were saying this was like 2005 2006 they already saw policing was transforming in ways to abet gentrifiers so I think they've been on to it for decades oh sorry do you think your body the technology in which we're going actually have partnerships in your body similar to the others every time you walk through an intersection you're going to be automatically identified I would not surprise me but hopefully I won't be alive by then but I mean you already see it in Amazon and you're using it for employees and to track employees movements and their productivity it wouldn't surprise me in the far who knows how fast the technology develops but I do think that's the importance of sort of you know back to the earlier question about how do we galvanize it's not that again I'm not like a techno pessimist but it's how are we using this technology and I think you do see a lot of people younger people who are saying becoming more critical of this and more aware of it so hopefully they can stem off that future but the way things are going now I don't see why not is that considered equal incarceration oh yeah yeah yeah but I mean one of my arguments is we might have inspired that system the US and again it's an ethnic minority putting essentially a camp which ok that's not new but also some of the facial recognition things you know when they're walking around in just an open street like they'll be identified and these things can be sent to authorities they can be sent to stores for purchasing things and all the rest of it but I don't think I think the idea that it's that radically different in China than it is in the US is overrun and perhaps orientalist I don't think it's as radically different as like the media likes to like to show I mean they got the technology the social credit score that they use again that's a Wall Street invention the only thing they centralize it but we disseminate the technology through the private market I don't know what's worse history shows it could be worse if it's disseminated through the market it could be more unstoppable if it's corporations rather than a central governmental bureaucracy saying we're using this power so participation of parents individual behaviors will retrench or reinforce the problem like in 1999 oh yeah or is or is actually right how eyes on the street and the neighborhood are often plotted as ways that or were seen as ways that sometimes the systems can be pushed or shifted towards them seeing like at least a very different value yeah yeah yeah so how are the mechanisms are they indicated in a value in a way that the institutions well well for the first part in warping space I mean mostly I'm mostly just talking about patrol cars and response time and making it I think the fantasy is having instant response to anything undesirable or seeming out of place or anomalous and in that sense what the cameras do is they cut down on response time and that has a history that goes back to the 40s with their problem CAD computer aided dispatch and it was displacing human operators for dispatch calls using sort of really well primitive computing technology but now we use it through the IOT and the idea is just if you could if this trend continues uninterrupted you can't imagine a future where people have biochips and they do anything wrong jaywalking you can sort of have this instantaneous authority pop up almost materialized out of space but the second question that's tough one I think it's a really good question I think so having people sort of see like a police state and be sort of surveillance sentinels for the police it's usually rolled out in the language of community policing and data democratization and these types of things and this happened before big data and I noticed it when I did research here with community groups in Bed-Stuy who they were civilian anti-crime activists and you know I went in there and by the end of my research I was like they're just functionaries of the police right now they had real problems there was of course violence and crime but in many ways the police were trying to mobilize them to expand their surveillance capabilities so I think it does it's more it contributes to the ubiquitousness of the police and of police surveillance and it's cheaper and you know you could fit this into some the older bull story of devolving administrative duties from the state to the communities or the private sector so I think all of those things are at play


Welcome traders to another tipmail chart here with me Patrimonial. I want to draw your attention to potential developing opportunity in Bitcoin on the daily timeframe. Obviously had a pretty sharp decline, testing the support here now at 30,000 level. However, as we hold symmetry swing resistance every look at the last corrective leg before the waterfall move there. I'm looking for resistance to hold now at 43,000 area and looking for another leg lower to test the yearly pivot at 20,000 and maybe the selling trend line coming in here at 18,300. Watch what bullish reversal patterns here to set long positions and certainly we can think about retesting 42,000 area as in this short upside target. As always traders, plan the trade, trade the plan and most importantly manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.


The Chairman of the Presidential Transition Council and Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustafa Seher's efforts have been put in place to ensure that the presidential transition process is not truncated. This follows the conclusion of the presidential election in February as President Muhammad Buhari is expected to hand over power to Bola Tunibu President-elect on May 29, 2023. As far as the presidential transition council is concerned, that's the essence of our setting up the various committees, the inauguration committee, which has responsibility for the processes of the inauguration, the swearing in the parades, the activities preceding the formal handover of power. The security facilities intelligence committee has the responsibility to ensure that nothing happens to truncate the process. So I can give you every form of assurance that Nigerians are very low abiding people. Whoever has lost an election, we have provided for avenues for those people to ventilate whatever legal inquiry they want to make. But the process will continue on a better and I can assure you that we are putting everything in place to ensure that the formal processes of handover takes place and we do not create a new political or constitutional crisis. 29th of May 2023 is D-Day and that by the grace of God will come to pass.


West St. Louis Creek is an aquatic research site within the 93 square kilometer Fraser Experimental Forest that is owned and managed by the U.S. Forest Service near Winter Park, Colorado. At an elevation of around 9,521 feet, this mountain creek is nestled within an evergreen forest that lies just west of the Continental Divide. Automated instruments collect physical and chemical properties of the stream, surrounding riparian area, in the atmosphere. Observational sampling of aquatic organisms and biogeochemical processes are also collected at West St. Louis Creek.


Today on the channel, we're going to take a look at First Impressions on Frieren. Frieren? Frieren! Frieren! Frieren! I don't know how you say it. Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're taking a look at Frieren. Like I mentioned at the top of the video, this is volume one. Now, I do have volume two, but it did not arrive in time for the making of this video. So we're just going to focus on the first volume, a sort of first impression spaces on the series, and how it can move forward from that, my overall impressions on it. So what the heck is this series about? We follow the character of Frieren, a near immortal elf. She has a ridiculously long lifespan compared to other people and creatures of this fantasy world. And the story takes place after the main journey of our heroes is ended.   We follow the character of Frieren and her journey now that the main one has ended, how does she move forward from that? And when the main hero passes away of old age, it really comes at a realization, sort of an epiphany to our main character and how she views life, how she views the difference in age and how precious time really is, even though she's nearly an immortal due to her long lifespan. And you know, for a regular human, we don't live that long. And she sort of has a resentment. She wishes that she could have talked to Paimo and then probably butchered his name a little bit more and gotten to know him better. And that is one of the many themes explored in this series. After the funeral, how do you move on from there? She comes to the realization that she wants to go on her journey of her own. She's a fan of collecting magic, weird magic going through the land and helping people and just experiencing life from a different perspective. Because to her, going to see something might be, you know, a couple years might be what to us would be a couple of days. And for some other people, it would be a whole lifetime. And that in a nutshell is sort of the basis for the story. It's not a super complex tale. It's more of a character driven narrative of Frieren who at first glance might seem cold and calculating and not as lively as you would think. And you see that reflected on their friend's funeral when one of the mourners takes notice over and thought that she couldn't express such emotions, which was a shock. And she sort of wishes to have had more time to know more about her friends, not just on this journey that they went through. Because even though it was 10 years, sometimes like in real life, we're just so hyper focused on the task in hand that we don't take a moment to appreciate everything around us and the people that help us and guide us through whatever task it may be and the good times and the bad times and stuff like that. The majority of what soon follows is her taking on a young human major apprentice and going on different adventures and tasks, helping out people and earning new magic spells as a result. So the story might not be the most exciting thing if you're looking for a fantasy epic of combat and like super amazing action scenes and spells and wizardry flight and you're not going to get any of that. Instead, you have a character that is forced due to tragic circumstances to sort of reevaluate what it means to live and experience things from a different perspective as well as something very important that rarely gets discussed in manga. And that is the concept of what lies beyond grief. And when you mourn someone, what happens afterwards? How do you continue to honor that person? How do you continue that legacy? And sort of the after effects of losing a friend or a loved one? How do you move forward from that? Maybe traveling back to the loved one's town or, you know, retracing your steps with that person on your journey. In the case of our characters, she decides to go back and retrace their quest to see all the sights and sounds and the villages and all that stuff. And eventually she comes to see the fruits of their labor as people worship these guys because they saved the whole entire kingdom or country or whatever. And it sort of gives her a new perspective and having that legacy of your loved ones that are no longer there and having these characters sort of motivate you and push you forward from beyond the grave, if you will. You know, speaking of Frieden, I found her to be a great lead character. She may seem cold, calculating, and detached from humanity, but she's brimming with personality. Sometimes a little lazy, sometimes not as open as you would like, but Frieden cares and wants to help the populace. She's on this quest to re-examine what she knew and find more about her friends for her betterment. This is evident by her taking on an apprentice at the request of one of her former party members. Through this, she further comprehends humans and our complex personalities. Now, the art in Frieden is really nice. It's simple. It's well-drawn. The characters are all distinct and beautiful to look at, from the oldest person to the youngest to our protagonist. They all look unique and you instantly remember who they are. Clean lines all throughout, beautiful backgrounds. When there are scenes of magic or maybe a few combat scenes that we see in this first volume, they're nicely laid out. Everything looks topped here. Just wonderful overall. It has that sense of otherworldliness. Like, you could see it being sort of a portal to this other world and it looks alive and you want to partake in it. Especially the scenes where Frieden with her apprentice are looking for a blue flower. And that whole scene just had such whimsy to it that I really enjoyed. It was just a really nice breath of fresh air. And certainly the story picks up at the end of the book when you have some revelations about Frieden's origin, if you will, and how it moves into the next portion, the next part of that legacy of honoring those that are no longer with us, going on this grand adventure and meeting with old acquaintances who are now older and sort of reflecting with you on past experiences. So yeah, a very interesting manga. I cannot wait to continue reading this. Obviously I'm getting it physically, so it's going to take a while to read more and more chapters. But when I've read so far, I really do enjoy. It's a breath of fresh air, well-written, great characters, fantastic, beautiful artwork. And I think just a nice introspective look at subjects that rarely gets discussed in manga. How about you guys? Have you read Frieden? Are you currently reading it as it comes out? Let me know in the comment section down below. Now I'm a huge fan of elvish characters in anime and manga. That's one of my favorite tropes. So I have this question for you guys. What are some must-read manga involving elves that you think I need to check out and highlight on this channel? Guys, thank you so much for liking, commenting, subscribing, and being a part of A We Can Geek Them. It truly does mean a whole lot. If you want to see more of this content where I talk about anime and manga, be sure to subscribe. Share the video if you can. It really does help the channel grow and reach more audiences. That's it for now. God bless. Stay safe out there. I will catch all of you on our next video. Bye.


Good morning everyone. If you could be seated. My name is Richard Swain. I'm a Davey Wiradjuri man and I've been asked to emcee this event. So welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. And first up I'd like to ask Mr Paul Giroa House to do a welcome to country. I'm a Dango Wiragawari Richard. I'm Richard Swain, Wiradjuri Gibya, respecting Richard as a Wiradjuri man, in a Nurembangu on country. So now I'm around Jumburu, Burumarambangu, Maranya. Good morning everyone. You and do Paul Giroa House. My name is Paul Giroa House. I'm from Maradu, Maraibiringu, Guji Gangaon Yambri, Nurembangu. I was born here at the centre of my ancestral country at the Alcambra Hospital. God bless it. Anyone born in the Alcambra Hospital. Great to see hospital alumni here this morning with me. Yinjimata Bala Boya Niang Nurembangu Bagarigan. Respecting language, law, people and country. Murubangu Bala Winganagu Yambuwan Bango Nara Nara. First to know the nature of things. Yilin Galangbu, Gibbabangu, Wugabu, Migaibu, Dira Nielbang. Ladies and gentlemen, young men, young women, distinguished guests. Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell. Chancellor Julie Bishop, the Honourable Julie Bishop. Students, academics. Niari Njimali Nyambri, Cambri, Gumao, Walgulu, Walabalawa, Nurembu, Nagarigo, Wiradri, Muji Gangaon Yambu Jeyandu. My respects to Nyambri, Cambri, Walgulu, Walabalawa, Nurembangu, Nagarigo, Wiradri, Eldest, Past and Present. Niari Njimali, Muji Gangaon, Nurembangu, Nenya Yiridu. My respects to all people and First Nation people from all parts of the country. Bango Nara Nara in the world. Nyambri, Cambri, Walgulu, Walabalawa, Nurembu, Maiengaon, Banyan, Niñogaon, Nurembangu, Dara. Nyambri, Cambri, Walgulu, Walabalawa. Nurembu people, welcome you all to country. Nardu Noyagoya Malang. It's wonderful, it's fabulous. Ninenna Nainmura Burumbabirra, Waiambana, to share this welcome to country with you all here today. Nardu Wurugabigi Balabambu Gubu, Balagibangu Gubu, Gunguliala Dumbali Nair Murwai Marambu. We listen to the old people, the ancestors, the elders, and they show us the good path, the right path, the straight path. Gunguliala Billengali Nair Yama Mali Nair Wala Mali Nair. They nurture us, they guide us, they protect us. Mambu Wara Naminya Gubu, Wurugabinya Wurudaregu, Winingala Gubali Gubu. Looking to see, listening to hear, and learning to understand. Nyani Injumali Nurembangila Balanin, Walawin Galanga, Bangbu Yanengengu, Nyani Marwangyao Billigigila, Yama Belgidi Yani, Bagarigan Yanengengu. We look after country so it is healthy for all our children and our next generation. And for all our people, we teach and we learn what is right for all on country. Muro Muginya Yinjumara Muro Muro Wurumbira Nurembangu. Living a respectful way of life, cares for country. Yinjumara Wurumbira Marando Gubu, Yira Gubu, Yanda Gubu. Respect is taken, responsibility for the now, the past, the present, and the future. Our welcome to the country is always made in the spirit of peace and care for harmony and reconciliation for all people of modern Australia and our main aim, always to establish an atmosphere of mutual respect through the acknowledgement of our ancestors and the recognition of our rights to declare our special place in the pre- and post-history of the Canberra region. The name Canberra is derived from the name of our people and country right here, the Nyambiri, the Canberra. Gazetted Canberra Station on the 22nd of January, 1834, under the New South Wales colonial government, Canberra Station, here at the ANU campus. Yinjumara, Yinjumau Gijo, Yinjumaru Buu. Powerful, irraduary words on country, and they mean many good things. To go slow, be patient, be polite, be gentle, take responsibility, uphold. Yinjumara Bala Bala Bidadabinabinabinah. Yawilawil Wurumbira Nurembangu. Respect can be found in the Canberra Creek and rivers and the breeze, quietly moving through country. Yinjumara Bala Bala Wala Mwangadabu, Murrumbadandabu, Bama Yuguru Gambira. Respect can be found in the grinding stones and the carved trees, made long ago on country. Gungulila Wijingayinawangaradagandabapa, Yirinigo. Respect can be found in how our matriarch dig for yams in Mother Earth. We've cared for Mother Earth since the dawn of time and evidence of our sovereignty, our ownership, our statehood, can be seen everywhere throughout the country. Our signature is in the land, not just our DNA. And taking care of country is important to us. Yinjumara Bala Bidadabinabinabinah. Yawilawil Wurumbira Nurembangu. Respect everything living and growing. The law of the land talks about Yinjumara Bala Badawinabinabinabinah. Yinjumara Badawinabinah, giving respect and honour to all people from all parts of the country who respect you. Maragaladal Walanmayanmayangalang. Hold fast to each other and power the people. Walangunmala Maramara Gurei. Be brave, make change. Deriyawana Murawara Nawanbida. Get up, stand up and show up. It's wonderful. You're all here today to share with us the start of this year, the commencement of ANU. We talk about Yinjumara Maramara Nianyinyi Girma Maranya. Respect that shapes us and lifts up the people. Yinjumara Maramara Winnengagigalana Mayan. Respect creates people who care for each other. Goyambana Nira Nurembangu. Welcome to country Mandangul. Thank you very much. Thank you, Paul. Welcome to country is something you'll get used to if you're new to Australia. Country is, if it's nothing else, it's our soil, the water and the species that evolved here. And I heard respect. Respect is something, something lacking unfortunately in modern Australia. So most Australians can tell you they love the place, but do they love the place? Can they point to a square millimetre of this place that may love them? And respect is, respect for country. That's the main, the main thing lacking in Australia.  There's a lot of intelligent people out there, but we seem to be behaving poorly and our landscape reflects that. So thank you, Paul. So some housekeeping. We have the ambulance and some tents over here. Lots of wonderful volunteers in pink vests and all of the buildings are open for toilets. So for those of you, this is your first day and challenging times, but particularly for Australia, Australia, this needs to be the decade of healing country or it's the decade of waving goodbye to a lot of country. And it is that respect and I often hear that it's the next generation. It's the next generation going to do the right thing. Well, I believe the next generation, their duty is to hold my generation to account and we can start behaving respectfully and intelligently towards the very country we rely on to survive. So the next speaker I'll call up is our Vice-Chancellor, Genevieve Bell. She's actually the first Vice-Chancellor, the first female Vice-Chancellor and appointed in 2024. She is... She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology at Stanford University and is a renowned anthropologist, technologist and futurist. I'm very keen to have more yarns with Genevieve. She spent more than two decades in Silicon Valley helping guides, helping guide Intel's product development and social science and design research capabilities. She's best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development and for being an important voice in the global debates around artificial intelligence and human society. Sounds like we've got our great Vice-Chancellor for the times we're in. So Genevieve Bell. I made Richard promise he wouldn't read out my biography because it always intimidates me. And it makes me wonder what it is that I'm doing here as your Vice-Chancellor and what I'm doing back in Australia. But I wanted to begin by acknowledging where we are today on the lands of the Ngunnawal and the Nambri people and to pay my respects to elders past and present and to acknowledge that we're on land that was always sacred and never ceded. And to think about the fact that it's not enough to acknowledge those things anymore. We also have to commit to making things different, making things better. I talk a lot about the fact that we have a responsibility to make the world a better place to make it more fair, more just, more sustainable. And I think a little bit to tell stories that are more hopeful and optimistic about a future we can make together. And there's no better place to do that than on day one. Day one for all of you at this place. For some of you it's your first day. For some of you I know it's a return trip and we're grateful to have you back. For me it's day 43 of being Vice-Chancellor. And I know there's some of you in the audience going, I don't even know what a Vice-Chancellor is. I wasn't entirely sure what it meant either when I said yes to the job. I certainly wasn't prepared for the wave of incredible support I've had from people and also the wave of people's opinions about how I should be a Vice-Chancellor. I imagine for some of you your parents and your friends have opinions about how you should be a student here too. I bet some of those are opinions about what you should study. I bet some of them are about how you should turn up and what you should do here. I have some solidarity with you in that. I was told as a Vice-Chancellor I couldn't wear sneakers. I was told as a Vice-Chancellor I shouldn't wear jeans. I was told as a Vice-Chancellor I should do something about my hair. I was told I should can the backpack. I was given some other gratuitous advice too. I suspect many of you have been given advice that is equally unhelpful. So I don't want to give you any advice but I do want to tell you that being in a place like this is special. That being here is a moment in your life and an opportunity that you should lean into with every fibre of your being. I know for some of you it's the first day and I remember what my first day was like here. It's a very long time ago. My first day here was in the 1970s. The first time flared jeans were a thing. And skateboards frankly were a thing too. My first time here as a child was when my mother came here as a mature age student as a summer scholar and we lived in Ursula College. So a shout out to those of you from Ursula. I remember it from the 1970s and it still smells the same. It also means that I remember what it was like to find this place both magical and utterly overwhelming. Because as a small kid and I imagine as a young adult there's something about a place this big with so many people and so much opportunity that it's hard to know precisely how you want to navigate it. Good news is you are surrounded by people you'll get to navigate it with. You will make friends here. You will find teachers and staff who shape and reshape the way you see the world. You will find places of this country by square millimetre all in love with. And you will be changed by the experience at least that's my hope for you. That's not my gratuitous advice for you but my hope that in education you have a transformative experience that this place is full of critical friends and critical conversations. I know some of those conversations will be hard and I know that we will attempt in every way we can to scaffold you through those conversations. To give you the tools to have healthy debate to give you the tools to learn new things you didn't know before. Sorry I'm admiring the bird life. It's kind of marvelous. We'll give you the tools to identify those too if you're new here. I'm thinking Crimson Rosellas but don't quote me on it. We will try and make this a place that is home for you in the time that you are here and one that when you leave you think of fondly the way I thought of this place fondly for the nearly 30 years I was gone before I came back again. No gratuitous advice. Just hopes and one small promise. I'm also on a journey with you. It may be your first day. It's my 40th. I also will find myself lost on campus. It's a big campus. We have a lot of buildings. 243 they tell me. It's a big campus. It is about 150 hectares and we have more than 9000 fabulous trees. If you see me looking lost please feel free to help I will do the same. I can guarantee you there is an app that doesn't always help you find everything that will help you find many things and yes a girl from Silicon Valley is now going to tell you to find your mobile phone open your app store of preference and download the app for campus which is helpfully called ANU OK. You will find it. It has maps. It has helpful guidance in it. It's a useful place to find out what's going on as is every other way we will tell you all the extraordinary things this campus has to offer. Not just your education but a series of clubs a series of societies and a series of moments where you will get to I hope connect and find new pathways through and I hope a year from now those of you who are new will be sitting here again and that you will help me welcome the next extraordinary cohort of people to this extraordinary place. So it's a great day. Day one for some of you, repeat day for others. In those first days it's okay for it to feel overwhelming. It's okay to think you've got it because you haven't and someone is going to call you up short on it. I've had a few of those days already and it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to look a little bit lost. It's okay to wonder when you open a cupboard what exactly is in it or you open the next email and wonder precisely what you're feeling overwhelmed is part of what being at a university is about and part of the social contract between me and all of you is that our job is to make sure that you have tools to manage that overwhelmedness and you come out the other side extraordinary and I know you all will. I know whatever happens here at the other side of all of this you will be extraordinary extraordinary citizens extraordinary human beings and extraordinary citizens of this country or of others and that feels like the most amazing gift we can give all of you and one that I hope you want to be part of. So thank you for getting here. For those of you who I called personally and I did call some of you personally thank you for taking my call and thank you for turning up here. And with all of that what I get to then do is also thank everyone who made today possible and I hope you will join me in a round of applause for our admissions office, our residencies, people who help you find your accommodation, people who helped you get here, the people who organized today because none of this happens magically or mysteriously and I know I'm hugely grateful that we get to make this moment for all of you. So my thanks to the people who made all of that possible and to my extraordinary Auslan translators too. Yay! And because I know some of you are not physically here but online you are missing campus. The ground is unexpectedly green for February the trees are green, the parrots are loud and everyone here is I think full of the enthusiasm that I want it to be for day one. The last thing I get to do in my little round up here is to welcome the keynote speaker for today. I'm incredibly excited that it's Ashley Streeter-Jones she's an alumna of this university she has a master in diplomacy from the ANU and I have met her in many places beyond this one. The last time I have a feeling it was cold and we were in snow boots and thinking we were very far from home indeed. We're incredibly lucky to have Ashley with us today. She is the founder of raise our voice Australia a social enterprise that's mobilizing young women and gender diverse people through education and community and campaigns. She was named the Victorian young Australian of the year finalist in 2024 and she's just a force of nature and I always recommend you want to start here well you should start it with forces of nature so Ashley come on Well thank you for the lovely introduction I too would like to begin by paying my respects to the Nunnable and Neambry people the traditional custodians of the land pay my respects to the elders past and present and extend those to any First Nations people here with us today Vice Chancellor Staff but most importantly students welcome and welcome back my name is Ashley Streeter-Jones I am an employee a volunteer a sister a daughter, partner, friend and founder I am certifiably terrified of the dentist still obsessed with Pokemon and a not-so-closet heavy metal fan who just never grew out of her emo phase I love my friends can quote most episodes from Bob's Burgers and absolutely detest Mayonnaise I'm usually the first person to clap and I can often be found on any dance floor even without the music I'm an advocate an activist who believes deeply in the power of the next generation and is fascinated by systems I'm deeply uncomfortable with the way that the world works and I've dedicated my time to challenging this status quo like many of you I also moved to Canberra to go to ANU enrolling in my masters of diplomacy when I moved it was my aim to look back yeah I would do that again I arrived in Canberra on the 16th of July 2016 the night before the move I lay in bed staring into the dark full of nerves and wondering if I'd made the right decision held back tears as my partner and I packed the car not taking anything that didn't fit hugged my parents and got on the road it was cold it was rainy I almost certainly cried on and off for the first hour as I got my head around moving out of home moving in with a partner for the first time moving into state starting a masters at a new university and how on earth I was going to build a life in a place where I only knew one person it was a lot of change at the same time and I'll be honest for the first few months I was desperately lonely I was so homesick that I extended my masters for another semester I told myself if I've gone to the effort of moving to Canberra I'd better make it worth my while I hope that I've done it justice fortunately I loved my time at ANU being able to connect with leaders in the field participate in practical learning through negotiation workshops diving into some of the most complex global conflicts and connect with classmates from all over the world I was in my element my masters took me to a graduate role in national security diplomacy I contributed to Australia's keeping strategy wrote briefings for cabinet the secretary and the chief of defence for us I led dialogues in Jordan and Fiji led our engagement with Tuvalu and have since applied those same skills in our COVID response gender equality policy and now in sexual violence prevention and response and that's just my paid work I enrolled in my masters to explore my interest in the way that systems make and break inequality and while university was one avenue for this it certainly didn't end there my volunteer work and the opportunities available to me in Canberra have taken me from politicians officers to the United Nations to the World Economic Forum perhaps most importantly I have met some of the best people I know have explored solutions and ways to raise the floor on inequality have run training programs which support the next generation of politicians and public policy makers started important conversations and taken opportunities I could never have dreamed of I haven't done one element of this work alone every step has been a team effort and gosh I've worked with some great people along the way many of whom I met here in Canberra and some even at ANU I've been reflecting on what I would have wanted to hear when I was where you are today which is a bit historic but doesn't actually feel so long ago really I wanted someone to tell me that everything was going to be okay but being the anxious little human I was I'm not sure I would have believed them so assuming some of you might also be feeling this mixture of nerves and excitement there are some things I've learned over the years that I would like to share the first one be audacious the best things I've done in my career to date have hands down been the cheekiest it was audacity that drove the emails I sent to politicians in 2017 asking them to let a young woman or gender diverse person take over their office for the day it was audacity which started a conversation about the absence of these young people from our decision making bodies audacity which has seen over 300 speeches written by young people by politicians in our federal parliament audacity which saw my social enterprise discussed at the World Economic Forum it takes audacity to look at something and think I can create and be part of making something better don't get me wrong audacity must always be accompanied by respect and politeness but sometimes instead of asking why you need to ask why not take the deep breath and hit send on that email the second one challenge the status quo there's nothing that makes me make this facial expression faster than someone saying that's how it's always been done but you'd be surprised how often that phrase comes up it's got to be one of the worst reasons for doing anything in this challenging it's also important to ask who does this benefit who's in the room and how can I get them there there are many ways to ask why can you tell me more about that I'd love to hear a history of how we arrived at this solution or perhaps a simple why is that ask these questions and ask them often fortunately your time at ANU is focused on learning and will guide you to ask those right questions challenge systems and be part of solutions if something doesn't feel right ask why interrogate that feeling in your gut and don't be afraid to imagine something better but importantly as you challenge as you climb bring others with you the third one take risks as someone who absolutely loves their comfort zone it causes me a great deal of angst to confess that it is true that life does not happen in your comfort zone probably like many of you just hazarding a guess I do have a significant fear of failure and as the eldest daughter an out of control guilty complex so eldest daughter is here I see you the truth is every time I apply for a job grant or opportunity I am terrified every time I create something out there I am terrified and many times when I challenge things I am terrified but very few things that are worth having come without risk one of the most challenging days in my career was the day that I actually launched my social enterprise I had many conversations with my mentor who had taken me through the various scenarios I delayed and delayed done the cost benefit analysis and worked myself into a ball of stress pressing share on that social media post was like putting a piece of myself into the world for judgment and scrutiny it was raw, it was uncomfortable and gosh I felt vulnerable the three years on we've grown to a team of 30 have graduated over 120 participants from our trainings have released two research reports and have received over 1,000 speech submissions to the raise our voice in parliament campaign which has worked with over 80 federal politicians don't get me wrong progress isn't linear and there have absolutely been times where things have gone wrong but it's been worth it growth is rarely free from risk and I wouldn't be where I am today wouldn't have worked with the World Economic Forum UN Women and have spoken alongside former Prime Minister Julia Gillard or US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken without it take that calculated risk number four keep an open mind it seems to surprise people when I share that I'm not someone who plans their career in fact almost nothing I've done over the last six years of my career has been planned and look there is benefit and planning and making strategic decisions but I've also learned that the best opportunities are the ones that you don't see coming because the reality is we don't know which rooms in which rooms our names are being spoken we don't know where this journey will take us we don't know who's seeing our work sometimes you have to put it out there and hope for the best the best opportunities I've had are the ones that have scared the life out of me that have challenged me that have pushed me far outside that comfort zone if you told me ten years ago as a bulky, determined and passionate 19 year old that I would be where I am today I would never have believed it I also couldn't have put myself on this pathway as the doors that have opened for me and the doors I've worked to open were doors I never knew existed but I wouldn't change them for the world so if it's fear alone that's holding you back maybe it's time to say yes no, when to walk away we've all heard the old adage about quitting quitting is bad quitting sits in opposition to success quitting is a moral failure from my experience quitting is not the opposite of perseverance quite the contrary sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in pursuit of success is knowing when to walk away like someone suggesting 2am fireball shots and moose heads if you don't get that yet you will pull the semesters out it's probably best at that point to just go home earlier in my career I left a project a venture that I'd co-founded and which I loved but I'd realised it wasn't the right avenue for me to make the change that I wanted to make after many months of soul searching moral reflection and difficult conversations I made the decision to leave I didn't have a clear idea of what would come next or what that pathway was but I knew what wasn't for me it wasn't an easy decision but it was one of the best decisions I've made in my career so far as an old mentor once said to me be married to the problem not the solution don't let a fear of quitting bind you to something that doesn't serve you number six enjoy camera show of hands who got flack when they said they were moving to camera okay who got flack when you tell people you live in Canberra yeah alright look same and I have to tell you the jokes wear off Canberra will always hold a very special place in my heart it was the place I moved to the first time I truly backed myself it's the place where I've consolidated my values my identity where I've had some of my biggest career wins and again which introduced me to some of the best opportunities and best people that I know in those early days after the move I spent a decent amount of time crying in the shower I had extended my masters by that semester telling myself that if I had the courage to move to Canberra I had to do it properly and over time my inner monologue changed it went from oh my goodness what am I doing to this is incredible that I'm here to back myself Canberra is a place of rainbow roundabouts beautiful weather kangaroos, hikes, wineries APS lineards politicians at Coles Monica and maybe like me you'll end up living next door to your local MLA this is the place where the biggest decisions in the country are made and many of those decision makers pass through ANU if you haven't yet please give yourself time to love Canberra and explore the unique opportunities that exist here and if you haven't got yourself a Catmandu or MacPack a black puffer jacket you'll want to get on that the last one be kind to yourself there's many kinds of learning university provides one kind making mistakes provides another both are equally valuable learning is hard putting yourself out there is uncomfortable sometimes you will say the wrong thing make a bad judgement call miss that assignment deadline or simply misjudge the situation I'd hate to count the number of hours that I've spent lamenting the things I wish I'd done or I'd said importantly please know that you are valuable and you have value outside your work and your study there's a reason that I got up here and introduced myself as a person not as a CV there is truth to the saying that it's not about how you fall down it's about how you get back up learn reflect and remember that there's power in saying you're sorry that you've messed up that you genuinely reflect on how you can do better and put that into practice next time my best friend delivers the best reminder would you ever talk to me the way you're talking to yourself and not once has my answer been yes be audacious, challenge the status quo take risks keep an open mind walk away, enjoy Canberra and be kind to yourself along the way looking back 7 years down the track I can hand on heart say that my Masters of Diplomacy was absolutely worth moving for regardless of what you're here studying at A&U I've got good news this is just the beginning the journey is yours to define and the people sitting in this space are here with you never forget as well that you have the power to be a force for good to create the change that you wish to see and make sure that no person gets left behind and it all starts today thank you thank you Genevieve and thank you Ashley I think we could give them both another round of applause the audacious and honestly audacious rings true for me I'm a river guide and I was born and bred in the snowy mountains a few years ago I rang a radio station very cranky that the New South Wales Government was going to protect feral horses within the National Park over and above our native species and I was brutally honest a voice for country and this is first gig as an emcee actually and I get to share the stage with these amazing people and six years down the track I'm an honorary associate professor and yes I get to meet people and be a part of the Fenner School and the Canberra, the Canberra bubble you'll hear that it is a good bubble it's a different bubble and it's needed it's needed more than ever that good bubble of people who are prepared to do the right thing by society and country it's needed now more than ever because we for our species in particular maybe not society but definitely our species our species have certainly had enough of our disrespect and years ago you may have ridden a horse here or walked here but most of the waterways were drinkable and now they're not they don't have to not be we don't always have to celebrate our poor behavior if I was to tell you that some country was going to dam 12 major rivers and 76 creeks we'd be and they're not even going to put in a fishway that would upset most people I've just described the snowy scheme to you we need these good bubbles we need these great people to make the changes to make the changes that place, country, the earth it needs us right now to be honest to be audacious and yeah to step out of our comfort zones like probably all of us have here today so I'd like to introduce Phoenix Phoenix O'Neill they are the president of the ANU Students Association and I'll let Phoenix explain to you what that is good morning everyone I would like to thank Paul for the welcome to country that was delivered earlier and I would also like to acknowledge that this event is taking place on Ngunnawal and Nambri lands and pay my respects to their connections to the lands and to the waters I can imagine that this is many people's first time in Ngunnawal and Nambri lands and for some it may be even the first time that you're experiencing a welcome to country during your time at the ANU I encourage each and every one of you to learn about the traditional custodians of the lands about the oldest continuing culture in the world for which we are so lucky to live on the lands of and about the enduring survival and resilience that these peoples have had in the face of 200 years of colonization this always was and always will be Aboriginal lands my name is Phoenix O'Neill and I'm the president of the ANU Students Association or ANUSA which is your student union we are the peak representative body for all students and we advocate for students at the university level organize events for students we organize protests on important issues and we provide free services for all students such as our legal service and student assistance for any academic issues that you might be having and free breakfast every day at the Brian Kenyon student space this is ANUSA's first year representing both undergraduate and postgraduate students and we are extraordinarily excited to be the student union for all students I think that this change that we are now for postgraduate and undergraduate students also represents on a larger level that we're the union for each and every student no matter who you may be and we're your union we want to be working for you so if you have something that you want something that you want to see out of the university please come to us and we'll be there I remember spending a lot of my time wondering what being a normal university student looked like you know the day to day stuff and now that I've been here for a while I think I can tell you about three things that a normal student does and much of it is similar advice to before but I think it's still really important first of all a university student does study unfortunately you'll also sometimes not study when you really should be studying a week will be full of academic advice on managing your workloads from your college I encourage you to seek that out but I also encourage you to remember this advice coming from a student university is a time when you should push yourself but not a time when you should be breaking yourself finding university hard is also normal be it finding the content difficult or the fact that many students at the moment have to balance the content going to university with jobs it is hard we all find it hard at some point but how do you deal with it being hard ask questions whether it be to your course conveners or to your fellow students who are mentally unwell feel free to ask for that extension if you have an ongoing condition find out what an education access plan is and apply for one it will make your university degree more flexible and I wish I had known that earlier many students do all four courses at once but also don't feel ashamed if you can't if you need to do three courses or if you need to drop to part time you will probably actually you'll definitely end up staying late to finish an assignment you will probably end up staying over a few assignments I still do and I also know that I'm not the only one you will learn the term copying the 5% which means when you hand in an assignment late and you lose 5% of your mark and while I won't recommend it I will say that your world won't end if you do and so you should be using time to look after yourself studies stressing you to the point of impacting your physical or mental health is unfortunately common but it shouldn't be normal if you want to help yourself in this position reach out for help your friends can help you, people at your hall can help you if you live on campus and Anusa, us or the ANU colleges can help you with your academic situations and there are several free services at the ANU that can help with your health I don't want to scare you this won't necessarily happen to you but I also do want to be the voice that will remind you that if it does happen that there's help to be had and that you can ask for it because they get involved and they have a social life if you hear somebody tell you who's already graduated about their time at university it's actually not usually about their time studying it's about their time living on campus or with their university friends their time involved in the club or their time at the club as much as studies important a huge part of the normal university experience is outside of the classroom when I moved to Canberra I made a huge amount of new friends and I had my world view diversified in your first year whether you're here from far away or you're from Canberra meeting new people and making new friends because many of these people will be your support system throughout your time here I remember when I arrived I met someone who was just over at the door next to me because my head of halls thought it would be funny to put Phoenix and Phoebe next to each other and it was and that person is still my best friend to this day and one of the most important parts of my support system so it's important that you talk to people this week during O Week I'm sometimes worried about the fact that my study is impacted by me being involved in a lot of things for example you should get involved at your residential hall or with the nurses departments which represents marginalised groups or with the club but these have been some of the most fulfilling things that I've done at the ANU and I don't regret a second of it even if it meant perhaps that an assignment didn't get the attention that it fully deserved and you should also consider getting involved with protests and you should also consider whether you're a university student if you don't go to at least one during your time we're in a critical time for students with the cost of living and housing crisis tertiary education funding being cut and the cost of university increasing while we're being underpaid for our jobs on a wider scale we're facing a climate crisis and it's a critical time for Indigenous rights and justice it's normal to worry about these things and it's normal to think about these things his students have historically been stronger than what we're here to do you will be told in your classes to think critically about the content that you're looking at and about your readings and we also want you to encourage you to think critically about the university and about the world that you live in and the third thing if you can let me be cheesy for just one second is that there is no normal I have friends who spend most of the week studying and friends who spend most of the week working I know people involved with a million different things and people who spend their free time watching movies and chilling on their couch I know people finish their degrees on time but equally as many who have changed their degrees multiple times or who are taking a bit of extra time to finish it up I have friends who excel academically friends who struggle a lot with university and most people lie somewhere in the in between of there your time at university will be the most fulfilling if you spend your time doing things that are important to you and it's normal to have absolutely no clue what that is while you're sitting here today but your first year is the time where you'll figure out what that is so please try new things try things that are outside of your comfort zone and talk to new people figure out what's important to you and prioritize that and if that changes, change what you're doing look after yourself and look after your friends use your time at the ANU not just to study but to have fun, to get involved to stand up for what you believe in to be kind to yourself and most importantly to learn thank you thank you Phoenix the river guide I can't really advise you on university so that was Phoenix's job so thank you but we view the river as the river of life so there are some calm pools then there are some rapids often you get out of your boat and you have to evaluate what's happening on that day and pick a line you've always got to pick a line and sometimes I'll send my guide down that line first and then if they stuff it up then I'm not going that line but then there's the yahoo moments and we really yahoo and so I hope you get all of that out of your next few years here I hope you get the river of life as I term it it's an incredible opportunity, incredible times and as daunting as the times are you only need average intelligence to understand what's happening to the planet and our species but we can do it with a smile and we can have fun and we can enjoy every moment of starting the journey of healing country and when you hear the welcome to countries in the future think about it their children, babies, burais women people long stories they were real people it's not a mythical piece of Australia's history it's a real piece and it's an important piece because modern Australia now needs to include itself in that journey erase that line and modern Australia needs to now step forward and accept the responsibility of custodianship and to start behaving like we are of here, we are from here and it is now our journey to be today's custodians and so thank you very much everyone and hope you had a great commencement ceremony in 2024 and our wonderful speakers thank you and I hope you all stay around to mingle