“Zoom solidarity,” Places Journal, April 2020. Featured in “Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching.”
The rapid shift to online instruction has prompted the production of countless images portraying individual resilience and techno-capitalist ambition. Around the world, institutions and faculty members are filling their social media feeds with scenes from the new world of remote instruction: students taking notes while lying in bed as they log in to lectures; the kitchen tables where adjuncts are trying to teach; classes with multiple live-screens boasting sophisticated technology and global reach. Yet on my first day of Zoom-based instruction at the University of New Mexico, I confronted a radically different reality. No longer living on or near campus, many of the 90 students in my world architecture history course were not able to attend class by video; they could not hear or see my lectures in real time without disruption or disconnection. Some were connecting to class from Native American reservations with uneven access to high-speed internet; others were trying to join in from rural communities with impossibly limited bandwidth; and still others were sitting in their cars, trying to find the wi-fi hotspots in parking lots. In short, my Zoom screen looked nothing like those I saw circulating around the internet.
Students were connecting from Native American reservations with uneven bandwidth, or from their cars, looking for the wi-fi hotspots in parking lots.
To make it possible for everyone to fully participate within the deceptively homogenized Zoomscape, our class organized itself quickly. We realized, for instance, that if all of us muted our microphones and disabled our videos, the reduction in collective bandwidth would allow us all to listen and participate at once. But the overall meaning was clear: the contrast that was evident on the screen — the beaming faces, the silenced voices — was underscoring the structural inequalities that already limit access to higher education in America. Yet at the same time, and albeit unintentionally, the new interface was offering lessons about the power of cooperation and solidarity — not unlike those understood by activist organizations in our field. The shift to online learning is making me keenly aware of my own privileges as a tenure-track educator within a public institution; it is also inspiring my history students to examine their own constructed histories, and the various privileges they represent, in newly materialized ways. More than ever, Zoom is reminding us that each voice matters and that no proprietary platform should dictate the terms of our discourse or the frameworks of learning. Indeed, I hope, post-Zoom, that our institutions of higher education will be measured not by access to the latest tools and technologies but rather by our newly energized commitment to equity and justice, empathy and cooperation.
— Aaron Cayer
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