Community Studies

public service. Their mobile units consist of one certified EMT and one certified counselor. Their role is to respond to crisis in a timely manner, de-escalate, and help members of the community find solutions in times of crisis by exploring the free services offered in the local vicinity. The program has been incredible in enabling community members to avoid institutionalization and maximize their own autonomy in times of desperation.

This paper explores the possibilities of a non-hierarchical, anarchist university while mapping out its projected operations so as to facilitate a structure of education where all who are involved are empowered to participate in the decision making of all processes which affect them.

In order to conceptualize human rights, one must conceptualize a universalizing understanding of the human category. This is where the paradox of human rights emerges-whereas conceptualizations of human rights are applied through top-down definitions outlined by the United Nations, the implementation of human rights necessitates on-the-ground community organizing. Due to its nature derived from predispositions of situated precarity, community organizing renders communities targets of human rights violations in the form of retaliation--in turn rendering subaltern communities outside of the human category altogether. This occurs because these communities are already existing within a system that fails to render them visible as humans defined within their contexts. These circumstances become exacerbated as survival necessitates challenging the system which has rendered communities invisible in the first place in order to live with the kind of dignity that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seeks to institute. This process occurs through mechanisms which operate as "arms" of the institution of human rights. These "arms" include but are not limited to institutions such as nation-state(s), law(s), Western medicine, race, and gender. In this sense, human rights as applied within a universalizing paradigm furthers the project of globalization which has historically codified some of the most atrocious human rights violations, as Julietta Hua writes--"The conceptual conditions tied to universality, which define it through and against difference, are important to understand because they ultimately constrict how human rights can be used as a political tool even as these conditions also provide the reason why human rights offers almost limitless possibilities for imagining alternatives". 1