It was a dark and stormy night when Alana Felton found herself locked in a closed, dark police station in Belarus. In the pouring rain, she was marched across a bridge into her apartment and forced to prove that she lived there.
A common misconception of higher education is that it takes place in an “ivory tower,” separated from the reality of human life. Unfortunately, there is often hostility toward scholars; in the United States alone, there have been discussions of banning American research projects involving Chinese scientists and of cutting funding for political reasons. I spoke with Pomona College professor Alana Felton and Pitzer College professor Emily Matteson to uncover experiences with surveillance and censorship in our own academic communities.
Felton works as the assistant director of college writing and as a lecturer in English, overseeing the Center for Speaking, Writing, and the Image (CSWIM). Felton received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and taught in Belarus from 2018 to 2019.
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DM: What was your experience like being surveilled [in Belarus]?
AF: I was interviewed [by Belarusian national media in front of my apartment] and then a few days later I got a call again at the university on my … phone. It was the police station calling me. I was very confused, like, why would you want to talk to me? … I go to the police station. They take me in. I’m locked in the police station … no lights on, and they start questioning me. They claim — and I to this day have no idea if this actually happened — they claim that a neighbor saw the news story [with me] and called them, and said that I was lying about where I lived … I was like, where else would I [live]? I just moved here.
They wouldn’t take my word for it. They made me walk in the pouring rain across a bridge and into my building and prove that I live there … [A] female police officer goes in … walks all over my apartment, touches stuff, then barely says a word and leaves amidst all of this. I had called the embassy and no one answered the emergency line, so I was just kind of on my own … They would sometimes show up again and check that I was still there. [Checking in] is a fairly normal thing they did with foreign students, [but] what was alarming was that I was accused of lying about where I live.
Later, the American embassy sent me a box of [ESL pedagogy] books, one of which is, I kid you not, “Teaching English For Dummies” … to distribute to the teachers at the college. We had the books sent to the university under my [Belarusian] friend’s name … because they weren’t sure the people working the [university] desk would know that I worked there. But apparently this was a red flag; the dean of the university … was all panicked about it.
He was like, “You can’t have stuff like that sent here. The [Belarusian] KGB thinks it’s propaganda and they won’t let me give it to you,” so it was held for a long time. And then finally they gave it to me, and I was like, “Well, I was just going to leave it here for everyone to use,” and they were like, “Okay, we’ll do that.” They put it in like a locked cabinet and no one could open the cabinet. So that was my introduction to being surveilled.
There’d [also] be moments I’d be on the train with a friend and I would bring up something political they’d be like, “We can’t talk about that here,” or they’d [turn] off their phones and then they would talk about it.
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The idea of surveillance in academia might conjure a thrilling tale of evading government operatives and collecting data, but this particular reality is much more subtle. When academics are treated with suspicion, it breaks down trust and hinders research and education.
I also spoke with Emily Matteson, visiting professor of anthropology at Pitzer College, whose research focuses on abortion politics and activism in Chile.
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DM: How have anthropologists responded to censorship?
EM: Anthropology News, which is an online magazine, [is] currently creating a new section called “Defunded” where they are [asking] for submissions from … scholars whose work can no longer be studied, shared or written about due to federal funding cuts, closures of particular academic departments and different political attacks on various research subjects.
I’m an abortion scholar, and so, in the current moment, I’m always thinking about the ways that I present my work, how I talk about abortion. In cases where I’ve applied for various forms of funding, I’ve certainly had to get creative about the ways that I talk about the work that I’m doing, [such as] emphasizing … health and discussions of different rights … without using the language of abortion.
DM: Do you feel like surveillance and censorship have recently become more of an issue for most academics?
EM: I think that for many of us [researchers], we are not strangers to heightened surveillance or critique of some of the subjects that we study, but at this moment in time, there are a lot more roadblocks … when it comes to things like funding.
DM: Do you think censorship makes communicating your ideas or communicating with other scholars more difficult since you have to talk about things in a more creative way?
EM: [Censorship] can create a limitation on understanding the actual work that’s being done and the importance of that research. It can be limiting in terms of finding connections with other people who might be studying similar subjects … Certainly, it’s a limitation in terms of the type of knowledge that’s able to be produced and what we’re able to do with that going forward.
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These stories deal with broader issues, but they creep closer and closer to home. There has been no shortage of surveillance-related campus news; 5C Critical Mass’s teach-in about the recent use of ALPRs in Claremont, a recent TSL opinion piece and an older TSL news article point to the ways that surveillance has been used in concerning ways on Pomona’s campus. We must also avoid the trap of self-censorship and support the voices that share these stories in and around our communities, academic or otherwise. Perhaps the greatest enemy of all is complacency.
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