Art has long been a cornerstone for revolution. Whereas there are many narratives about artistic interventions in the established norms and systems of oppression within society, there has been less investigation of how the values held within artistic spaces inspire revolutionary change. Artistic spaces produce different modes for thinking about art, its function, and how to create space for its production by all people. I researched these norms within the context of Dutch art cooperatives that emerged from squatting movements in the 1960s and 70s. My research gave me an understanding of Dutch anarchist frameworks and their implications for creating new forms of working environments that prioritize community over capital. In Seattle, I constructed an ethnography to find different values in artistic communities through interviews and experiences in those spaces. I used my research in artistic spaces to map the values held and record how those values implicate different structural frameworks. My main question is how artistic spaces produce different structures that allow for interventions into systems of oppression and to what extent they open opportunities for revolutionary change and individual growth. I measured these through qualitative findings through interviews to find the varying values held within a community and how those are associated with organizational structure. As I continue my research throughout the winter and spring, I anticipate finding the level of collectivity and revolutionary modes of thinking to be based on the organization’s histories within the arts. These findings will implicate how artistic communities vary based on geographic location and the historical norms of that community. The findings will further provide a basis for future understandings of how the arts can create spaces that allow for revolutionary questioning of norms within Seattle and beyond through a historical narrative. 

In the spring of 2024, student protesters nationwide established non-violent encampments on college campuses, demanding university divestment from military and weapons manufacturers linked to the war on Gaza. At the University of Washington (UW), the Liberated Zone (LZ), organized by a coalition of student activist groups known as the United Front (UF), occupied the Quad from May 1st to May 17th. Muslim students were highly visible in the encampment, yet often stereotyped as a monolithic group, obscuring the internal discourse on identity, activism, and civic engagement within Muslim American communities. This project documents the LZ through oral histories of five Muslim students—Palestinian and non-Palestinian—supplemented with an analysis of student news coverage and digital artifacts from Instagram pages managed by groups such as the UF and the Muslim Student Association. By examining intragroup discourse among Muslim students and intergroup conversations with non-Muslim peers, family members, and the broader Muslim community, my research explores how students navigated solidarity, intergenerational perspectives on activism, and shifting perceptions of the university as a political space. Findings will contribute to the historical memory of student activism, highlight the role of intergenerational influences in shaping political engagement, and preserve narratives often marginalized in institutional and media portrayals of campus protests.

Our understanding of atomic physics has driven technology for the past century, but we still know shockingly little about the internal structure of protons and atomic nuclei. Studying quarkonium production in high-energy electron-proton collisions is a potential gateway into probing the mysterious glue that binds nucleons together. In this research we compute the cross section for heavy quarkonium production in nuclear deep inelastic scattering at small-x within the nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics framework. Our methods decompose the process into independent leptonic and hadronic processes and includes octet contributions from S and P wave states. We employ quantum electrodynamics Feynman Rules to solve the leptonic process, and compute the short distance coefficients for the production of the heavy quark pair within the framework of the Color Glass Condensate effective field theory, which accounts for the effects of multiple interactions of the heavy quark pair with the nucleus at all orders. Our results provide insights into the kinematics of quarkonium production at the future Electron-Ion Collider at BNL.